Story of Your Life
by Fjallsarlon
Summary: The problem isn't that Neil is dying. The problem is that Neil doesn't dare to hope, and Eva refuses to let go. The problem is that Neil and Eva are both equally bad at honesty and asking for help. The problem is that Neil knows how the story ends. In the end, the middle is all that's left.
1. Act I, i: burnt norton

**Story of Your Life**

Summary: The problem isn't that Neil is dying. The problem is that Neil doesn't dare to hope, and Eva refuses to let go. The problem is that Neil and Eva are both equally bad at honesty and asking for help. The problem is that Neil knows how the story ends. In the end, the middle is all that's left.

* * *

 **Act I. The Important Thing**

"The ending isn't any more important than any of the moments leading to it. The important thing is that over here, they are happy." –Dr. Eva Rosalene

* * *

 **i. burnt norton**

"They say a man doesn't know himself until he faces death for the first time…I don't know about that. It seems to me that the person you are when you're about to die isn't as important as the person you are during the rest of your life. Why should a few moments matter more than an entire lifetime?" – _Warbreaker_ , Brandon Sanderson

* * *

The recruitment brochures for life-generation agencies often emphasise the singular opportunity that is memory traversal. Memories, after all, are unique: each memory is inextricably tangled in the warp and weft of the person. A pair of identical twins with the same memory of a skip-rope game will notice different things, and these details translate themselves into the differing textures of their memories.

After years on the job, Dr. Neil Watts thinks that the recruitment brochures could do with a little more gritty realism. Travelling backwards in a dying patient's memories is often strangely akin to watching a train-wreck in reverse: there's no stopping it, and you know how badly it's all going to end, if only because extremely content and happy people don't generally sign up for life-generation. It's the people with gnawing regrets on their deathbed that do so, and that means some pervasive unhappiness, or: train-wrecks.

Weddings are the worst; there's all that _happiness_ and promise and joy and glowing faces, except he already knows how it's going to end, like skipping forward to the ending and then re-watching the episode all over again.

Thing is, of course, it's not that straightforward: when it comes to memories, leapfrogging backwards from one memory to another is half chasing butterflies, and half piecing together a murder from clues at the crime scene. The earlier memories give the ending context: without context, it's almost impossible to make sense of the ending.

This is how it ends: with the stars overhead, like billions upon billions of lighthouses, blazing at the far end of the sky; the constellations drawn out line by line in cold brilliant light, traced by his grandfather's hand. The Northern lights burn, sheets and sheets of eldritch green dancing in the night in eeriely beautiful streamers.

Before them, the lake is cool and pellucid and black; part of Neil is thinking about that proverb about still waters running deep and also, that he really, really wishes his grandfather'd lived, that he could've taken his grandfather here to see _this_ , the sight that makes his breath catch in his throat, that steals it all away in beauty and glory.

Eva takes his hand. There are no words.

"Don't," he says. His smile is as crooked as his spectacles. "I kinda figured it was gonna end like this."

* * *

This is not the beginning, but it is _a_ beginning: a way to begin to understand the end. It doesn't matter, you see, that there is an ending, that the ending exists even now, right now; even while they live and laugh, even while the universe rushes towards inevitable heat-death.

The point isn't so much _what_ the ending is; the point is to understand it.

So: Eva Rosalene (not yet a doctor) scribbles note after note, keeping up effortlessly with the lecturer. Two rows down, Neil slouches in his chair and doodles on his writing pad and breathes in the heated fumes from his styrofoam coffee cup.

"When working with memory alteration," Prof Cho says, "We typically don't work directly with the patient's memories." She taps her laser pointer against the palm of her open hand. "Reasons?"

The girl a row behind Neil offers, "The results of memory alteration generate confusion: the patient is presented with two sets of conflicting memories. But altering memories is itself messy and if done directly as a live process to the patient's memories, would inflict more distress than strictly necessary."

"A decent answer," Prof Cho agrees, with a nod. "The ethical concerns associated with memory alteration procedures are serious ones. We'll be covering this more in your Professionalism module. Anyone else?"

Eva will later admit this: that Neil surprises her, by drawling, "'Cause the technology won't let us."

Prof Cho's dark eyes flick over to focus on him. "Explain."

"Explain to _whom_ , Prof?" A note of challenge enters Neil's voice.

If Eva were sitting right next to Neil at this moment, she'd have elbowed him. Except that abruptly the world freezes—or at least, Prof Cho does, and at least half the lecture theatre, and she supposed she _should_ have noticed, this, except she'd forgotten just about everything while trying to keep up with the lecture.

"Good," says another voice, and the air ripples, that's the best word for it; ripples lazily like the illusion of water on a running track on a hot day, and another Prof Cho materialises, slowly descending the steps until she's side by side with her counterpart at the lectern. "Tell me, when did you figure that out?"

Neil shrugs. "I'm awesome like that," he says, artlessly. "Oh, and you were pretty much giving the exact same lecture as in the recordings from last year."

Prof Cho gives a bark of a laugh. "So I see. I'll have to keep that in mind. Well, then. Let's briefly return to your comment. Why won't the technology let us edit memories directly?"

Neil quirks an eyebrow. "Probably 'cause it's messy, like what she said just now," he gestures towards the girl, frozen now, with the rest of the memory. "But also 'cause the technology doesn't work that way. It scans the patient's mind and sort of traces it to produces an incomplete copy, like a read-only program. It's only after we generate a new, alternate life that the entire thing can be written back to the patient."

"Well," Prof Cho says, turning to regard the entire lecture theatre. "Today's lecture, as you might have been able to guess by now, is going to revolve around the differences between a memory-trace algorithm and the actual person. The most superficial difference is that you can rewind a memory, resetting the algorithm, which behaves as it does at the very beginning of the memory. For instance—"

Someone groans, audibly.

Prof Cho smirks. "Don't worry, I'm not going to make you sit through the entire lecture again." Muted laughter greets her remark. "Or at least, I won't if you can show me you remember what you've covered with Dr. Nguyen. So what are the main differences?"

Tentatively, Francis offers, "If an algorithm is read-only, then it can't change, right?" He's a lanky guy with an easygoing smile, and has a predilection for dorky T-shirts that would put even Neil's loudest, most embarrassing shirt to shame.

"Qualify that statement," Prof Cho urges. "An algorithm is capable of reacting to unexpected circumstances." And this time, she does unfreeze one of the algorithms, namely her own. The memory unspools again, or so Eva imagines, as the algorithm looks right at Prof Cho and stammers, "You...this…what—"

Prof Cho freezes the algorithm again as she calmly continues, "The algorithm did not expect to meet the original. Yet it was capable of reacting and processing known information."

Neil surprises Eva by speaking up. "Ryle and Christensen refer to this as the hard limits of simulation," he says. "They argue that the differences between memory-trace algorithms and actual persons are concrete ones; we can chip away at them with technological innovation, but eventually, our efforts will plateau. I disagree."

"That's all very well, Neil," Prof Cho remarks. "But that doesn't help us when it comes to distinguishing algorithms from human beings." She frowns at him. "For the record, at this point of your studies, you aren't in a position to agree or disagree with established researchers. Your main focus should be on demonstrating a grasp of the material."

"Sure," Neil agrees, and Eva notices that he's sitting up straight, now. "And they mostly think so because by definition, people are much more complex and complete than algorithms are. Thing is, Prof, I've known kids in high school who're about as complex as an amoeba."

Laughter ripples through the lecture theatre, and even Prof Cho's stern expression cracks for a moment, and Eva catches a flash of amusement.

"Again, I will repeat, your main focus at this point should be on understanding the material," Prof Cho says, firmly. "When you demonstrate an understanding of the material that rivals your grasp of sarcasm, Neil, _then_ you may begin to think about criticising Ryle and Christensen."

Neil opens his mouth to argue further, but he's cut off by another student, who suggests that one of the differences to keep in mind is that memory-trace algorithms are fundamentally incomplete. "It's kind of like what Neil said about the amoeba, Prof," the student ventures. "They behave like you and me, but on the inside, there's just nothing going on in there."

"But that can't be right," Francis says, frowning. "If algorithms were empty of…well, I guess, of experience, then algorithms wouldn't be reacting with shock to discover they are algorithms. Just look at what happened just now with Prof Cho."

"No," counters the other student, "You're still assuming algorithms have any kind of secret inner life, or experience. Algorithms just play themselves out based on the constraints of the memory. They're basically just stage-puppets, or shadows in a play. Just because the shadow moves and talks and acts like a person doesn't mean it _is_ a person."

"If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and swims like a duck," Neil argues, "Then why the heck shouldn't it be a duck? You're raising the bar for personhood unnecessarily high."

"And you're lowering it," snaps the student. "The point is that you can't draw an inference from a subject's external behaviour to anything that's going on in there." She taps her head, emphatically. "Behaviourism is dead and buried for a good reason."

Prof Cho clears her throat. "We're wandering far afield," she says, a note of warning in her rough, husky voice. "Let's return to Francis's contention, that algorithms are set in stone and thus incapable of change. How can we best qualify this statement?"

"Algorithms can't alter themselves beyond the bounds of the memory," Eva says, tentatively. "They're time-slices of a person at a particular point in their lives. A person might respond to a car accident by developing a fear of cars, or by losing confidence in their driving skills. An algorithm isn't capable of such change in virtue of its very nature as a time-slice: the traits, beliefs, and mental states of an algorithm are fixed, unlike a person's."

"Better," Prof Cho says, and now Eva is on the receiving end of an approving nod. "You might, in fact, go so far as to say that people are capable of rewriting themselves; any capacity to change that an algorithm has is already written into it."

Neil, Eva notices, is frowning. But he doesn't say anything.

* * *

Afterwards:

"Since when do you watch recordings of lectures from past years?" Eva demands.

Neil pretends to be deeply-hurt. "I'm totally capable of buckling down and studying when I want to!"

Eva just rolls her eyes. Maybe it's true—she remembers those awards from the various projects he's done over the years at science fairs—but they both know that most of Neil's report cards also include the comment that Neil would do much better if he actually applied himself to his work rather than coasting along.

"Well," he admits, eventually, "It was 'cause of Brian and Yvette."

"Who?"

He smirks. "I play D&D with them on the weekends. You should come by, it's pretty cool. I'm a wizard, I throw fireballs and shit." He poses dramatically. "Kamehameha!"

Eva really doesn't know what to say. "And you watch past year recordings because of them?" she asks, sceptically. She can all but imaging Neil downloading one of the recordings, and almost-immediately deciding that watching it's just too much effort, and switching to an episode of _The Big Bang Theory_ instead.

"Naw," Neil says, dismissively. "Wild horses couldn't make me do it. But I saw 'em both in the lecture, and thought that was really weird. I mean, they're graduating soon, what're they doing in an introductory lecture?"

"Huh." Eva would have admitted this made sense—if they hadn't known all along that it was a memory recording. "You are so full of shit, you know."

"Hmm?"

"It _was_ a memory recording. We all knew it, going in. What we didn't figure out was who the algorithms were, until Prof Cho froze everything."

Neil sighs. "I was _really_ hoping you'd give me this one," he admits. "Okay, fine. So, what d'you think she had us stick on those helmets for? And don't give me that 'it's practice' crap—this isn't a lab class."

Eva frowns; as much in thought, as at his swift pre-emption of her instinctive response. Instead, she offers, "So you figured she was trying to have us pick out the differences between algorithms and people?"

"What was the lecture about?"

She has to admit he has a point, there. It's right down in the lesson plan, even.

"And the lecturer?"

Neil shrugs. "Imagine you're Prof Cho," he says. "Imagine you wanna pull off something so badass that you'll have the entire freshmen batch reeling. Whatcha gonna do, have them figure out which of their fellow students are algorithms? Not very impressive, is it? But to reveal to them that the whole lecture on the limitations of algorithms was being delivered _by_ an algorithm all along…" He slams a fist into his open palm. "Bam. Bamboozled!"

Eva nods, reluctantly. "Okay, fine. It makes sense…" That shit-eating smirk only widens, until she adds, "If you think about it in that impressively-convoluted way."

And of course, Neil ignores tone and simply seizes on the adjective. "Why, did I…" he waggles his eyebrows. "Impress you? Elementary, my dear Watson."

"You _were_ Watson," Eva informs him, tartly, most definitely unimpressed. She checks her watch and bites back a yelp of horror. "And _I'm_ going to be absurdly late for practical."

"Better leg it," Neil advises, unsympathetically, pale grey eyes gleaming with amusement. "Prof Mobrand absolutely _detests_ it when people're late."

He _would_ know, Eva thinks, dashing off with a hastily-shouted goodbye.

* * *

"It's not cheating if everyone does it," Neil informs her, loftily.

"I didn't do it," Eva points out, tersely, and he waves off her objection. She'd been the envy of their year, entering the Institute with a full scholarship from Sigmund Corporation. Everyone else knew they were going to be fighting on the job market upon graduation: _her_ place, though, was assured, and Sigmund was paying her tuition fees.

"Seriously, though." He hooks his legs around the chair and stares down into his coffee, as if trying to divine the exam questions in the drizzle of syrup and foam. "Sigmund Corporation's hard as hell to get into. I heard the entrance exam has a ninety percent failure rate. But you made it through."

"Yes, and I worked _hard_ ," Eva snaps. The idea of helping Neil cheat his way through the entrance exam is downright horrible and she isn't even sure what put that idea in his head in the first place. "It's not impossible, Neil, it's just—"

"—bloody difficult," he completes, his voice soft. "Ninety percent failure rate, Eva. And I'm not looking to copy your answers, I just want to know what the questions on the entrance exam are going to be."

She sips from her coffee and winces. It's absurdly sweet, and she swears she's never going to let Neil order her a coffee again. At least he's buying.

"It's still cheating."

His mouth quirks in an almost-smile. "Not if I give my own answers. Also, that's how Yvette ended up working for Sigmund Corporation. Gavin fed her the questions."

"I'll think about it," Eva says, slowly, ignoring that little unwelcome revelation about their mutual friend, "If _you_ tell me why getting into Sigmund Corporation matters so much to you. They don't have a monopoly on life-generation work, after all." Nevermind that Neil should be perfectly capable of getting in on his own, without asking _her_ to dirty her hands helping him this way. A no-strings-attached research scholarship from the Mnemosyne Foundation of Memory Reconstruction Research? Companies—and the government, for that matter—would be drooling over _him_. He could go anywhere he wanted. She was tied to Sigmund, at least for the period of her bond. "In fact, why life-generation at all? The world's your oyster, Mr. Research Scholar."

"That's Dr. Research Scholar to you."

"Not until we graduate," Eva reminds him.

He props his chin on his hands, studies her dispassionately, his glasses glinting in the sunlight from the café window. "Hardly a fair trade," he murmurs. "Considering you'll only _think_ about it."

"What's to stop you from fobbing me off with a non-answer, then?"

Neil raises sharply arching eyebrows. "So if I tell you—honestly—why I want to get into Sigmund Corporation, you'll tell me what the entrance exam questions are?"

Eva wrinkles her nose. " _And_ you'll owe me. A big favour."

"A big favour?" Neil asks, almost-mockingly. "Not your weight in dark chocolate? Not my immortal soul? Just a big favour?"

It's her turn to raise her eyebrows at him. "Don't give me ideas. Take it or leave it," she says.

He exhales. "All right, then. Sigmund Corporation is the best. There. Now you know why."

She stares at him, dumbfounded. "That's it?" And her bullshit detector isn't pinging, not quite.

"God, what other reason could there be?" Neil demands. He chuckles quietly at her expression. "That's just it. They're the best there is. They pioneered life-generation technology. Hell, I'd say they're right at the bleeding edge, if that didn't sound like such a boring cliché."

"And you want to, what, be right there with them?"

He shrugs. "Yeah. We're graduating at just about the perfect time, you realise, Eva. They're still pushing the limits of what can be done with this technology. You work for some second-rater like Hermann Corporation and you'll be left breathing in their dust. They're _that_ good." He looks at her, as if willing her to believe him.

She doesn't know if she does. Neil's as unreadable as always, for all their long years of friendship, and yet…

And yet he can still surprise her. "I don't think I've seen you get this intense about anything," she comments, and then corrects herself. "Not since that time they were selling tickets to the Doctor Who marathon."

"You wanted an honest answer. Your turn. What are the questions?"

"And why life-generation, then?"

Neil sighs. "Do you know how dirty memory reconstruction can be?"

Eva bites her lip. "I know what we covered in the lectures." Which mostly classify memory alteration and life-generation under the broader umbrella of memory reconstruction. When Neil says 'memory reconstruction' though, she knows he's not referring to the field in general, but one very specific set of applications of the technology.

He stares at his coffee, but he isn't really _there_ ; he's thinking, remembering, probably. He'd done his practicum with Mnemosyne, after all. "It's a hole," Neil says, at last. "A deep, filthy hole. You go in there, you sign at least twenty NDAs. Job mobility is non-existent: who's gonna touch you, once you've spent years digging through people's heads, trying to secure convictions? It gets even worse if you go into intel or psych—which won't take me anyway, since I'm primarily specced as an engineer. They're toying around with the idea of using memory alteration techniques in small amounts to adjust behaviour of actual, living subjects right now, as we speak."

"But that's…that's…" Not ethical, she'd wanted to say. Not professional.

"Incredibly fucked up?" Neil gives a harsh laugh. "No kidding. Enough honesty for you, Eva? Want me to violate a couple of NDAs while I'm at it?"

She can't quite put her finger on it, but she can sense his very real frustration; has the idea that this is as much honesty as she can dig up from him for today; maybe this is as honest as he's _ever_ going to be, at least on this.

Eva relents with a sigh. "You realise if they find out I've told you, we're _both_ going to be in for it."

"In for a penny, in for a pound, Eva," he says, matter-of-factly. "Questions. Now."

* * *

They both enter Sigmund Corporation at about the same time, which really doesn't surprise Eva. Knowing the questions beforehand is one hell of an advantage.

She doesn't call in her favour yet. She figures it's best to hang on to it until she _really_ needs it.

She's in on the memory traversal agent track; surprisingly, Neil gets in on the technician specialist track, which makes her think he really might've been dead straight with her back in their conversation at that café. They're assigned to different departments, though: Eva's come straight off her practicum, which involved shadowing Dr. Robert Lin on a number of assignments, and so she isn't particularly surprised to be assigned to Fieldwork. Neil, though, winds up right in Maintenance, but takes it surprisingly cheerfully.

"This," he says, waving his offer letter right at Eva. "Is exactly what I wanted. No rummaging about in people's heads, just pushing the envelope of what we can do with the equipment. It's _perfect_."

They do new employee orientation, trudging around in their oversized white lab coats ("You'll get to do things a little differently once you're done with probation," Yvette Gan says, winking, the same Yvette Neil once played D&D with, apparently) and Eva's head buzzes with all the new names, rules, and regulations to keep straight.

Her office is right across the hallway from Yvette's; Neil's is apparently a shared space down with the rest of the "Maintenance monkeys", he scoffs. "We're crammed four-to-one in terms of office space," he says, cheerily, peeping in on her office. "Seems like no one in Maintenance has ever heard of this mythical concept known as 'personal space.'"

Eva isn't sure whether to regard Neil's cheer as a good sign or not. He's usually far more touchy about his privacy and his space; being stuffed into a small, shared office space should've been a nightmare for him.

Meanwhile, she rubs at her name badge, somewhat self-consciously as she stares at all that new real estate, trying to decide how she is going to make that space _hers_.

At least a couple of plants, Eva decides. It'd spruce up the place a little; add a touch of green to grey and white.

"Hey, Eva, check this out!"

The door is ajar, and she yanks it open to see Neil scooting by on a swivel-chair and grinning at her. "We can race! This is awesome!"

"Neil, this isn't even our first day. We're on _probation_."

He just stares at her. "So?"

"You want to keep this job?"

"Spoilsport," he sulks, but obediently returns the chair to wherever he'd managed to steal it from.

Yvette is just looking on, amused, and she finally shakes her head. "You two haven't changed, huh?"

"Can't improve on perfection, Yvette," Neil interjects, having returned sans offending swivel-chair.

"That's _one_ way of putting it," comes Yvette's wry response, and she shakes her head slowly. "Don't let Robert catch you and you'll be fine."

"Robert?" Neil asks. Eva all but rolls her eyes. She can just see Robert and Neil clashing, if they ever run into each other. Thank goodness Neil's with Maintenance, rather than Fieldwork. The two hardly cross paths, except when Maintenance is rolling out a new build, or Fieldwork's sending in their equipment for repairs.

"Dr. Robert Lin," Yvette explains. "He's…" she seems to struggle for words. "Extremely experienced," she says, at last. "He's been here for ages; I think only the McMillans have been around for longer. And he's got a rather…intense personality." She looks over Neil and smirks. "Honestly, I think you two are going to get on like petrol in a ditch set on fire."

"Sounds like a glorious disaster," Neil says. His smile doesn't quite reach his eyes.

"'Glorious' is one way of putting it," Yvette replies. "He's in charge of giving you the briefing on Sigmund Corporation's mission and values later on, so I'd advise you pay attention." That was _definitely_ directed at Neil.

"Why? Is there going to be an exam on it afterwards?" Neil asks, and his amusement is more than apparent.

Eva has had about enough. "You," she says, stabbing a finger at Neil. "Just stop being a pain for a couple of minutes. And you," she turns on Yvette. "Stop encouraging him."

"Just a couple of minutes?" Neil asks, ironically.

"If it wouldn't stretch your capabilities to try for a whole day instead," Eva says, acerbically.

"Ouch," Neil rubs at his chest. "That stings."

Amazingly enough, he does back down into a restive sort of silence, but at this point, Eva will take what she can get without looking the gift horse in the mouth.

* * *

She should've known, honestly, but all things considered, their probationary months are spent working separately; Eva's assigned to work immediately with Yvette, and Francis Kellert, the other fresh graduate from the Institute, has been assigned to learn the tricks of the trade from none other than Taima McMillan herself.

She doesn't see very much of Neil during the probationary months. In their few brief interludes between scurrying around the place, she learns he's been set to shadow the more experienced technicians down in Maintenance until he's broken in enough, and yet still, somehow, he's managing to get himself drowned in all the repairs and upgrades and patches that need to be done.

Yvette immediately puts Eva through her paces as she learns the tricks of the trade: all the little details about memory traversal, as much art as science, that they don't tell you about while you're at the Institute.

"Winter is the worst season," Yvette explains, one day. "It's why we take on new hires in the summer—we have the least patients then, so it gives the newbies time to get used to things before the flood of cases come in." She runs a hand through her short-cropped dark hair. "One thing's for sure: by the time winter rolls around, we'll be hopping from patient to patient and wishing we had just an hour of sleep more."

Eva knows, of course, that deaths rise in the winter, but knowing it is one thing: understanding what it meant for them is another.

"Overtime," Yvette says, and Eva gets the impression that a good amount of that cheer is feigned; she's picking up hints of strain behind that white smile. "Lots and lots of overtime, only it isn't really considered overtime. The pay's good, though. Hope you deal fine with irregular shifts. I'm no night owl, and I can't function on all-nighters if I'm not drugged up to the gills with caffeine."

Eva commiserates with a shiver; she's hardly a night owl either, but she imagines Neil gloating all about it, and he practically inhales coffee anyway.

She's barely into her first week at Sigmund Corporation when Yvette picks up a call re-routed directly to them. "Yvette Gan, speaking. Yeah? Uh-huh. Got it, we'll be right there."

Eva's packed her things by the time Yvette hangs up. "We've got a patient, haven't we?"

Yvette nods. "Yeah." Her eyes flick to where Eva's briefcase sits, clasped, by her feet. "You're packed. Good. We need to go, now. Clock's ticking. Patient was in an accident and they're trying to get her stabilised."

Truth to be told, Eva doesn't recall all that much of her first patient.

Your first case _sticks_ with you, sure, but time softens the sharp edges of memory, enough that she stops cutting herself against it. Their patient is middle-aged, an accountant, with the first threads of iron-grey in her hair. Her wish is to become a best-selling novelist which is ridiculously easy since she apparently writes fanfiction in her spare time, so they don't have to plant a new desire, simply reinforce what's already there.

"You're good at this," Yvette murmurs, as they race through the patient's mind, alternatively cajoling cooperation from the memory-imprint, and then searching for memory links to weave into the memento, leapfrogging their way backwards through the memories.

Of course, none of it is real, but more than anything else, Eva remembers the faint smile on their patient's lips, seconds before she flat-lines.

Yvette scrubs roughly at her eyes with the back of her hand. "Good," she croaks. "We're done here. Let's go—we can deal with the forms later."

* * *

Neil is surprisingly close-lipped about his work. What Eva does learn, she learns from Francis, mostly. Apparently, "he's awful at this unofficial no-fraternisation policy they have going on," Francis grins; it's a light, easy smile that cuts right through your defenses. Eva imagines he weaponises it to great effect when dealing with a patient's worried relatives or friends. "Maintenance is supposed to keep to themselves, we're supposed to keep to ourselves. Neil, though, he just keeps hopping over as if he wants to know exactly what's going on in the field. Says he'd be in a lot more trouble, but he's awesome and the other new tech monkeys suck butt so they let him get away with it."

Eva finds herself chuckling with fond exasperation, if only because she can imagine Neil using exactly those words.

Still, she finds Neil in her office when she gets back, sitting on her desk, legs crossed at the ankles, nibbling on a bowl of chocolate chip cookies.

"Get off my desk," Eva says, eyes narrowed. "How did you even get in here?"

"Picked the lock," Neil supplies, amused. He munches on a cookie and offers her one. She frowns over at it. "Dark chocolate, don't tell me you're not tempted."

"Fine," Eva murmurs and accepts the cookie and bites down. In fact, there's no nuts at all, which comes as a pleasant surprise. "You just…oh, do I even want to know why you're snacking on cookies in my office, having picked the lock?"

"Eh," Neil shrugs. "Cookies are good. Also, you just got back." He's somehow able to turn that statement into a question.

"Yeah." She helps herself to another cookie. "They haven't sent you out?"

He regards her with a raised eyebrow. "I'm in Maintenance, remember? If they're dispatching me anywhere, something's gone terribly wrong. And when I say 'terribly wrong', I mean the sort of wrong that should make everyone start burning incense. Besides, Francis passed me these cookies. Said the patient wasn't eating them anyway."

"Neil!" she all but shouts. "You mean, you can't just… _Francis_ can't just…"

There is a mocking glint in his eyes. "Gotcha," he murmurs. "Did you really think Francis'd steal cookies from a patient?"

Eva raises an eyebrow and waits.

"Well, I might, possibly," he admits. "Especially since said patient would no longer have need of delicious, homemade cookies. But no—there was a bakery right down the street. I got him to buy me a bagful."

She looks hard at him for a few more moments, but eventually decides that he's not messing with her. "What're you, his mission control?"

Neil laughs, delighted. "Shucks, I've got to remember that one for next time! 'Mission Control to Major Kellert, I demand cookies and a shrubbery.' Hey, what was that for!" He grabs, belatedly, at the crumbly cookie she flung at his face, and picks it off the floor, shrugs, blows lightly, and eats.

"First, that's disgusting, and second, you utterly deserve this for ruining my favourite song."

"Five-second rule, Eva! And what, 'Ground Control to Major Tom, Ground Control to Major Tom, take your protein pills and put your helmet on'?"

Truth is, Neil isn't half a bad singer, especially when he puts his mind to it. He did score that stint as Watson, after all, for that musical back in their high school years. But Eva never has and never will admit it; he'd be insufferable for months, if she did. The cookies are good, though: with just the right amount of crunch, crumble, and fudgey dark chocolate goodness, and Eva can't help her sigh of pleasure as she steals a handful of cookies.

"Whoa, whoa, getting greedy, are we?"

"My office," Eva says, coolly. "And I haven't had anything to eat since the call came."

"Tsk," Neil shakes his head sorrowfully. "What happened to the queen of self-care? All those Microsoft Paint flyers in high school and college, reminding people not to burn themselves out cramming for finals?"

"She got a job," Eva retorts. She drops the briefcase by the foot of her desk and manages a rather undignified slump into her empty swivel-chair. "And became a responsible working adult."

He wags a finger at her. "Ah, ah, ah," he says, and with a toothy smile, manages a fairly decent Count von Count impersonation. "I'll buy responsible, yes, and working, yes, but adult? That might take some finagling."

"Well, this _adult_ ," Eva emphasises that last word, "Has forms and reports to fill in. So shoo. Don't you have to do them too?"

"Meh," Neil dismisses that. "Paperwork's boring." Still, he swings to his feet and heads out the door and shoos. It's only after Eva hears the door shut that she realises he's left her the bowl of dark chocolate chip cookies.

She thinks of calling out after him, but…

Ah, well.

She nibbles on the cookies as she boots up her desktop and starts to work on the reports and forms she has to fill from the patient earlier. Hardly the most healthy lunch around, all things considered. But especially with her first patient tackled—some kind of milestone, that—Eva figures she's entitled to a little indulgence now and then.

* * *

Winter comes and leaves, taking with it the promised avalanche of patients at every possible hour, both night and day. Even through the closed door, Eva can hear Taima chewing Francis out—mildly but firmly—over gaps in the reports he's been filing and sighs. At least they've all made it through their probationary period.

There's almost always a long queue at the coffee maker in the lounge, and when the entire coffee maker disappears overnight, Eva doesn't even join in the hunt. She barges into Neil's shared office space and pries him off it and relocates it back to the lounge.

"We all need this," she informs him, tartly, and feels half-human again once she can smell the rich, roasted aroma of hot coffee. "Go get yourself one if you really want one."

"See if I don't," Neil retorts, but his heart isn't really in it.

They see less and less of each other in the winter; mostly just murmured greetings as they pass each other in the hallway, and a packet of gingerbread men duct-taped to her door. Eva wrinkles her nose; she doesn't really like gingerbread, but she learns by now that she can get hungry enough to scarf down just about anything when rushing from one patient to another.

She retaliates by taping a packet of chamomile tea to Neil's office door, and adds his name in black whiteboard marker ink just in case.

It's gone the next time she passes by, but she never does get to see what effect her unwanted gift might have had.

The office Christmas party is held—much delayed—in the early spring, and even then, Robert and his partner, Vera, are off dealing with a patient; a last-minute call, Yvette explains, shaking her head. "This always happens," she sighs. "We try our best to schedule the party for when everyone's there, but…"

"Can't predict when someone's gonna die."

That's Neil, strolling over to join them. He offers Yvette a nod of greeting, which she returns. Eva glances around and finds Francis deep in conversation with Taima and Willis.

"In a nutshell," Yvette agrees. "How's work been treating you?"

Neil's grin is lopsided. "It pays the bills," he says, casually. "And I've probably got several gigabytes worth of music ripped from memory audio by now."

Yvette laughs. "Perks of the job," she says. "Gotta love them."

Eva's about to say something when Yvette's mobile rings, and she groans. Yvette doesn't look too pleased either as she checks for caller ID and then picks up.

"Patient?" Neil mouths, to Eva.

"Most likely," Eva replies, and grimaces. It would've been _nice_ , she thought, frustratedly, to actually have time to take a break from the never-ending onslaught of patients, and she'd planned on a dinner with Traci and their parents afterwards, too…

"…All right, we'll be there," Yvette sighs, and hangs up. To Eva, she says, "I know, it's not fair, but unfortunately, we're pretty low on seniority, so we get the job. Time to roll out."

Eva bites her lip. "I've got to call my sister," she says, at last. "Let her know I won't be coming."

"Y'know," Neil says, conversationally, "Maybe you're just getting in your yearly dose of drama early, complete with emotional violin tracks, but you might remember that I happen to owe a certain _someone_ a rather big favour…"

Eva blinks; that's right, she had been saving it, meaning to call it in when she really needed it, but… "You sure about this?" she asks.

"God, would I ask if I weren't?" Neil retorts. "What am I gonna do here, anyway, wander around like a lost lamb 'till they let me go home to chomp on frozen pizza? I'll do it."

"But you're not in Fieldwork."

Neil shrugs. "Eh, how difficult can it be, anyway?"

"Okay," Eva says, sternly. "That does _not_ inspire confidence. I'm doing it. It's what they're paying me for. In any case, _you_ can make yourself useful and call Traci, and then save me some dessert or something."

"Meh," Neil says, philosophically. "Your choice."

"Go get your things," Yvette instructs her. "I'll handle the equipment. And go make sure we have lots of coffee—we're probably going to be on the road for quite a while."

* * *

Another year passes; Francis, surprisingly, decides he's had just about enough of working in the field and swaps departments. "He's in Maintenance now," Neil says, when Eva asks. "What's more, they rustled up a new office for Luo and Kadroski, and Byrne left SigCorp altogether, so we're sharing an office now. You have no idea, Eva, how divine it is to be able to stretch—" he mimes an expansive stretch, elbows jutting out to the sides. "—without accidentally hitting someone in the eye, neck, throat, or groin."

"That, I don't believe," Eva informs him. "How the _hell_ do you end up clipping someone in the groin?" Neil opens his mouth, but she adds, hurriedly, "I don't even want to know, come to think of it. So how's he settling in?"

"Well enough," Neil shrugs. "Takes to it like a duck to water. Likes it a lot more than being in the field, in fact."

"Why?" she asks. Sometimes, with Neil, it's hard to figure when he's joking and when he's actually serious.

Neil shrugs. "Eh, you know. What could be more _exciting_ than getting to roll out the next ADG fix and then watching it blow up in everyone's faces when they use it in the field?" He deftly works his disposable chopsticks to grasp a slice of stir-fried beef.

This café is at least half an hour away from the office, but their stir-fried rice noodles are to die for, slathered in dark sauce with a heavy, smoky fragrance.

Eva studies him as she sips some chilled calamansi juice. "Then I guess I'll know who to blame the next time a couple of memories get fragmented."

He snorts. " _Please_. You'll know who to thank when everything works, exactly as it's supposed to. I accept gratitude primarily in the form of food, but movie vouchers and coffee will do in a pinch."

"You wish," Eva scoffs. "I'll believe that when you stop doing daily battle with the photocopiers in your office. How many has it been, hmm? Five? Seven?" One particularly memorable occasion had Neil cursing up a blue streak that could be heard all the way from Fieldwork, until Taima (of all people!) had come down to Maintenance and firmly told him to tone it down.

Neil'd never done that again.

" _Three,_ " he informs her, loftily, "And they deserve exactly what they got." He scoops up a handful of rice noodles. "The first two were barely hanging in there and should've been scrapped at least a century ago. The fact they lasted more than a week with me speaks volumes of my skills with a sonic screwdriver…and the occasional bit of percussive maintenance."

"I know," Eva says, her voice utterly dry. "Yvette heard your cursing and banging all the way from her office. I'm still surprised Robert hasn't dropped in to yell at you yet." She's starting to get the impression that Maintenance thrives on clamour and chaos, all things considered.

"Oh, Bob," Neil waves that off, airily. "We've come to an understanding, Bob and I."

"Does he know you call him that?" Eva wonders aloud, stirring her calamansi juice with her drinking straw.

"Hard not to, if you think about it. After all, I've been calling him Bob everytime we meet."

Eva won't admit this to Neil's face, but she would _pay_ to be a fly on the wall at their encounters. For all she and Neil are theoretically working at the same branch of Sigmund, it seems they don't often run into each other at all during work hours; most of their meetings these days really involve grabbing a coffee at the café just down the street.

Still, her impression is that Yvette was right: something about Neil just grates on Robert, and vice versa. It's probably a clash of strong personalities, all things considered.

She idly picks up several strands of rice noodles from her own plate and changes the topic. "But if Francis is with Maintenance now, then who exactly are you working with? Are you partners?"

"No one," he informs her, and then, on seeing her expression, "It's not that bad, you know. I send him flowers, he sends me candy. Also, I'm pretty easygoing—"

"—Right," Eva mutters. "Because I'm having a hard time reconciling that with the person who went through five lab partners in a semester."

Neil shrugs. "What can I say? Some people don't appreciate competence when they're working with it. Also, for the record, the fact that Travis was billed for all the damages he caused—independently of me—indicates he was every bit the walking human disaster I _told_ you he was. Even Godzilla couldn't have caused as much damage, blundering through Tokyo."

They pay for their food, drop a tip in the jar, and leave, strolling down the street, side by side, in companionable silence.

Eventually, Eva says, "Is it everything you imagined it to be?"

"Hm?"

"Working for Sigmund Corporation."

Neil considers it, for a long moment. "In some ways, yes," he says. "In some ways, no. You?"

"I like the job," Eva says. "I like that I feel like I'm…making a difference."

"A cosmically insignificant difference," Neil reminds her.

It's Eva's turn to shrug, but her reply has a not inconsiderable amount of heat to it. "From a cosmic perspective, we're pretty insignificant. But that's not the perspective we deal with on a daily basis. From a cosmic perspective, the whole rat race from grade school to the grave is a joke, if you think about it."

"Huh," Neil says.

"What?"

"That's…surprisingly cynical." He studies her. "I'm not sure I like it. You're stealing my job."

"Oh, my sweet summer child," Eva croons, "The things you don't know about me could fill an encyclopedia."

* * *

Shortly after, as if pride goeth, Eva and Yvette encounter their first—Eva's first, all things considered—failure. The patient dies and Yvette calls the traversal before anything worse can happen and Eva finds herself watching in the flesh as the patient flatlines and secondguessing everything, wondering what she could've done better, if only they could've been faster, more efficient in their canvassing of the patient's memories…

"Here's a new lesson for you," Yvette says, as they drive back to the office with their defeat, and the unhappiness of the patient's relatives hanging over them as a dark cloud. "Take the victories you can; don't let the failures get you down. We can't win 'em all. Sometimes, the doctor calls us out too late, sometimes the patient just can't hang in there in time for us to make the necessary connections. It happens."

"I know it does," Eva replies, and intellectually, she does know that. Failure happens. "I just…" She worries at the words. What does she wish? That it wasn't so personal? That it didn't happen this time? She feels like she's failed _the patient_ , and no longer is it an abstract concept; the patient has a face, and she's seen part of his history.

Thomas Cameron. She rolls the name about in her mind and writes it down on a list, resolving not to forget.

"We all do," Yvette responds, heavily. "But that's the nature of the beast. Care too much, and you find you're unable to carry on with this job, you know?"

Word spreads around the office quickly, and for all Eva wants to bury herself in self-pitying misery in her office, someone knocks on her door. "Come in!" Eva calls out, and honestly, she thought for a moment that it might've been Neil, but it was Robert instead.

"Can we talk?" he asks, and Eva toys with saying no, but Robert's talked her through the basics of the job, and it would've been doing him a massive disservice to be clamming up on him now, so she nods instead.

"I heard about your patient from Yvette," Robert says. "She says you've been taking the setback extremely hard."

"It's someone's life," Eva whispers. "And we didn't do right by him."

"No," Robert agrees. "You didn't."

She blinks. He smiles faintly.

"I'm not here to massage your ego, Eva," he says, matter-of-factly. "You're entirely right that this, from one perspective, is a tragedy. You failed in your duty to your patient. What I'm trying to tell you—what everyone, including _your partner_ Yvette is trying to tell you—is that failure is normal and unavoidable in our job. What matters is how we _respond_ to failure. We can let it kick us to the ground and decide we've had enough. Or we can decide to get up, and to try again. To do better the next time."

"And if we fail again?" Eva wants to know, heartsick at the thought of a string of Thomas Camerons following her through her career.

Robert shrugs. "That might very well happen," he admits. "But I know you, Eva. You care deeply about your patients. That's not a bad thing. You were a good student, and those skills are transferring themselves to the job you're now undertaking. It's extremely unlikely—I would say—that you'll be met with a string of failed patients."

"But if I do?"

"Cross that bridge _if_ you come to it," Robert says, firmly. "In any case, you and Yvette will need to write your reports—I'll talk you through the process—and there will be an inquiry, but this should be a formality, nothing more. I believe in you and Yvette—and I believe you're doing good work here."

He's as good as his word; he takes her out for dinner, too, and in the process, he talks about some of the tougher patients he and Vera have had to deal with, some of which were patients he, too, has failed. It's hard for Eva to think the pain of failure insurmountable, especially when she sees Robert talking gravely about each patient he and Vera failed to successfully tackle, but then (pointedly) about how many more they've helped.

It takes time, for the sting to go away.

Since word travels fast in their small branch office, her colleagues close ranks about her, each offering some small comfort in their own way.

Lisa drops by to let her know she's always welcome for a cup of tea and biscuits, and in fact, Eva does take her up on it once. They have a conversation that is both illuminating and that goes quite some way to easing the ache in her heart, the gnawingly deep and personal sense of failure.

Taima, on the other hand, gifts her a knitted wrap that runs in variegated shades of bright amber, and when Eva protests, Taima firmly tells her she needs a hobby to preoccupy her, this was made with kindness, and to pay it forward, if she must.

Gavin makes her a soothing ginger-and-cinnamon latte which somehow seems to settle with a gentle warmth in her stomach, and claps her on the shoulder, and tells her she's got a long way to go yet.

The work helps; Eva files reports, deals with the inquiry which, as Robert predicts, is a fairly straightforward affair, and then she and Yvette are assigned a new patient. She initiates the traversal with feelings of trepidation, but then it's the job, the job, and when she's traversing memories as fast as she can, there's no room for doubt, there's only focus and their objective in mind.

This one is a success, and she and Yvette exchange weary smiles as they pack up and prepare to leave.

Through this all, Neil leaves a series of increasingly obnoxious motivational posters stuck to her door. Eva finally loses patience at the one with Oscar reading YOU'RE GARBAGE, BUT REMEMBER, IT'S GARBAGE CAN, NOT GARBAGE CAN _NOT_ and barges into his office, waving the offending poster about.

"Recognise this, Neil?"

"Oh, hey, Eva!" Neil swivels about in his chair; she notices disassembled pieces of equipment strewn about his worktable. His smile slowly dies when he notices what she's holding. "Oh, uh, ye—maaaybe?"

"Is that a yes, or maybe?"

"Well, it's a yes if you're happy to see me, and a maybe if you're not," he ventures, tentatively.

"Stop leaving these things on my door, you moron," Eva growls and stuffs the poster back in his hands. "How many walls d'you think I have, anyway?"

He uncrumples the poster enough to look at it. "Aww, I thought this one was good! Besides, you can always just stick the new ones on top of the old ones. Look, that's what I do." He gestures to the entirely plastered walls of his shared office; Eva just pities Francis.

"Oh, so _that's_ why I can't see even a shred of plaster in here," Eva says, bitingly.

Neil shrugs. "Hey, posters are meant to be put up, aren't they?"

"Doesn't it defeat the purpose if said poster is buried beneath, oh, I don't know, _five layers of posters_?"

Neil glances about, cluelessly, at his office walls. "No…?"

"Remind me never to get you posters for Christmas," Eva mutters, as she takes her leave.

His reply is half-muffled by the sound of the office door closing. "You _never_ get me posters for Christmas, anyway!"

* * *

A few months later, Neil's one of the technicians picked to head out to a conference in Reykjavík. Eva, though, only hears about it from Francis. "Meh, I'd rather be someplace else—a nice scenic tropical island, shooting the breeze with a cold beer and a barbeque," Neil says, when she drops by his office during her break to mention it. "Instead, we get Reykjavík. D'you know how _cold_ it's gonna be? It's winter!"

Eva tries her best not to laugh. "Reykjavík's not _that_ bad. In fact, if you get the chance, you should go sight-seeing. And anyway, it's a conference, not a holiday."

"Sure. A highly-prestigious conference on memory reconstruction technology," Neil says. He already has a laminated badge on a lanyard lying on his desk: she picks it up and studies it. DR. NEIL WATTS, SIGMUND CORPORATION, TECHNICIAN SPECIALIST, it reads, in neat, dark letters. "Anyone who's anyone at all in the memory reconstruction biz is gonna be there. So why couldn't they have picked somewhere like, oh, Bali? I'd love to fly out to Bali on the company's dime."

"Very official-looking," she comments, setting both badge and lanyard down.

"You betcha!" Neil grins. In spite of his complaints about the conference's location, she can tell he's just happy to have been picked to attend the conference at all. "I'm pretty sure Mnemosyne will have its own representatives. But they can't touch this!" He picks up the laminated badge and admires it, again.

"Okay, I'm going to have to stop you here before you start rubbing it and crooning, 'my preciousss,'" Eva says, tartly. "Besides, what happened to priorities?"

"They went and—wait, what?" He blinks owlishly at her, as her words finally register.

"Priorities," Eva repeats. "Such as _lunch_."

"You're kidding—oh, God." He checks his watch and blanches. "Where'd the time go?"

"Yeah, yeah, I get it," Eva says, rolling her eyes. "You love it here, you'd like to do this kind of thing twenty-four-seven. Well, the queen of self-care's here to remind you there are important things—like lunch. And like not blowing off your friends."

"Did we—okay, one sec," Neil mutters. He ducks under his desk and somehow manages to emerge triumphantly, with a messy booklet in hand. He flips furiously through the pages until he finds one marked with a lilac post-it. "Okay, Eva, lunch. Let's roll."

"Is that a planner? And a _lilac_ post-it?"

"Lilac? It's just purple. Also, there was a huge pack of them in the discount bin."

Eva resists the urge to introduce her forehead (or Neil's)—none-too-gently—to the wall. "Yes, Neil," she says, letting out a long breath in a quiet sigh. "There _are_ more colours than 'just purple', we've learned something new today. Now, we're going to have lunch, if I have to drag you out of this office by the scruff of your neck. So, are you going to come quietly?"

"All right, all right," Neil grumbles. "Geez, Eva." He sticks the planner underneath the keyboard, with the scarlet bookmark ribbon poking out just so. "So, whatcha got in mind?"

"I was thinking of that salad place down the street—"

"God, no, we've eaten there at least five times, I'm gonna snap if I have to touch another salad. I vote the Turkish joint—the one with the spicy salami pizza."

"You know how unhealthy that is?"

"Don't tell me you don't like it; it's sinfully good."

"Sinful being the key word here."

"So?"

Eva sighs, heavily. So much for eating healthier, she thinks, even though Neil's right: they've been hitting the salads a lot over the past weeks. "Alright," she says. " _If_ you're paying."

Neil thinks about it; she can all but see the relevant mathematical expressions running line by line behind those cool grey eyes, but apparently, as far as he's concerned, paying for a pizza beats eating salad again, inequality established, QED. "Cool. Don't think you're getting out of this one!"

"Somehow," Eva mutters, dryly, "I don't think this was a possibility from the very beginning."

* * *

Neil, of course, discovers that Reykjavík has the best dark chocolate manufacturer in the _world_ and starts sending her smug text messages flaunting that fact. Because he's Neil, and he'd never turn down the chance to push someone's buttons, or twist that knife a little deeper.

 _Aren't you supposed to be working?_ she texts back.

 _Multi-tasking is for pros,_ comes his reply, but he falls silent anyway. She gets one or two emails containing pictures from Reykjavík and the conference, and just rolls her eyes because there's only so many selfies in a chocolate shop Neil can take before it starts getting awfully groan-inducing.

The conference photos, though.

She hesitates over them, wondering, trying to put words to the strange gnawing feeling inside. It isn't quite that she's _jealous_ , of course. But it's hard to look at Neil, grinning infectiously in the photos, or standing sober-faced, among the other conference attendees, their various badges on multi-coloured lanyards about their necks, and wondering about what she's doing with SigCorp.

Is she happy? Neil certainly seems to be.

Eva doesn't quite know, and that thought distresses her a little.

When Neil gets back, there's a new bounce in his step; a sharp, crackling energy to his movements and gestures. He'd go on and on about the different ways the other agencies and companies are eking out every bit of potential from memory reconstruction, if she lets him, and because she's partly amused, Eva does let him for a time.

He even gets her a huge box of dark chocolate from that world-famous manufacturer, and Eva sighs, but crosses out his debt without a grudge. It's hard to remain unmoved by that fantastically _huge_ assortment of dark chocolate. Dark chocolate with toffee, dark chocolate with slices of Seville oranges, dark chocolate with ginger, espresso beans tumbled in dark chocolate…

"How on earth did you even fit it into your luggage?" she demands, eyeing the huge box. It's taking up _way_ too much space on her desk.

Neil winks. "Would you believe me if I told you it's bigger on the inside?"

"No," Eva replies, almost immediately. "I'm convinced it's sorcery of the foulest order."

"Ah, but remember Clarke's Third Law, Eva. 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is—'"

"—indistinguishable from magic," Eva finishes, because of course, they've spent high school fighting over the same sci-fi books; one of the many places their paths crossed, back when there was only one copy of _The Caves of Steel_ in the library, and if one of them got to it first, the other was going to have to wait, and wait, and wait, and deal with all the inevitable gloating in the meanwhile. "So, I take it you're admitting to foul sorcery, then?"

Neil smirks, utterly pleased with himself. "Being a technician is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural."

Eva shakes her head, sorrowfully. "You were doing so well there, until you quoted the prequels."

"There's nothing wrong with the prequels, they're wonderful."

"Now that's blasphemy right there."

"I'm not a purist," Neil says, sticking out his tongue at her. "I watch to laugh at the emo angst kid and to enjoy the flashing lights and badass lightsaber twirling. Hey, I'm superficial, what can I say?"

She rolls her eyes. "Yeah, I think we knew that since you were practically worshipping Wendy during high school."

"You said you'd never bring that up again!"

"But it's practically a mine of untapped comedic gold," Eva replies, affecting Neil's sardonic drawl. Truth to be told, there was once—when the wounds were still fresh—when she wouldn't have poked at all, but the time was long gone, and now they could both look back and laugh, despite Neil's protests to the contrary, on their teenage years come and gone.

"Ha-bloody-ha," Neil scoffs. "Pick on my adolescent self's poor taste in teenage girls, why don't you."

When did they grow up? She finds herself wondering at the swift passage of time. Adolescence, with its endless insecurities and possibilities had come and gone, seemingly unnoticed, and all of a sudden, here they are, in the bright afternoon of their lives, working jobs a young Eva Rosalene and an equally callow Neil Watts had never imagined for themselves.

You developed—out of necessity—a kind of perspective, working in life-generation. You saw the way people narrowed down from the multitudes of possibilities in the morning of their lives, each glinting like the facet of a complicated lattice, down to the single, tenuous thread that marked the rest of their lives.

"Isn't it a waste?" she'd asked Robert, once. Back when she had only been a student at the Institute, doing her practicum with Sigmund under the supervision of Dr. Robert Lin.

"What is?" he prompted.

She struggled to put the thought into words. "We start out with so many possibilities, so many things we could do with our lives, and then we inevitably end up with only one of them, and all those other lives, unlived…"

"They're gone, of course," Robert said, knowingly. "That's what it means to actualise potential. All those other potential lives gone, in an instant, because we can only ever live one of them at once. But you know what?"

"What?"

"It doesn't matter. At least, not where we're concerned." He gestured towards what sees to be an endless infinity of possible lives; possible selves that might-have-been but would never be, each fragment of self stretching out in an unending chain to the edge of that digital horizon and beyond, each captured and displayed simultaneously by the power of life-generation technology. It's a training simulation, of course, and yet Eva's overwhelmed by the complexity, by the sheer, untrammelled 'what-could-have-been's. "Normally, you won't have to shift from the overworld to the tree of infinity. In fact, it's highly recommended you avoid the tree altogether."

"Why?"

"Because it's mesmerising," Robert explained, calmly. "Hypnotic, almost. You want to make sense of all that complexity, but how do you even go about understanding a single life, with all its contradictions, all the possibilities that will never, ever be?"

You didn't, Eva thought. Or you broke yourself trying.

"The tree of infinity strains the machine's capacity—you can ask Vera for the technical explanation, if you're so inclined—but it produces a visual representation of the many possible lives the machine calculates and weights, given each change you make to a given patient's memories. Sorting through the possibilities takes a lot of time; it's an exhausting method of troubleshooting, and most of the time, you're working against the clock so you don't have the time to go through the various branches to figure out where a change isn't being implemented just right. The tree represents exactly how the machine does what it does—in fact, it's sort of the underlying principle, really—but what we're really concerned with are the specific branches the patient asks for. This is important, Eva. If you go with the tree, you'll notice—" He called up a diagnostic window, entered some commands, and then waited. All of a sudden, the tree shrinks, as hundreds of branches are pruned, leaving still hundreds behind. "What did I just do?"

"You entered in some parameters," Eva guessed. "And in doing so, excluded irrelevant branches of the tree."

Robert favoured her with a smile. "Exactly so. And look—we're still left with hundreds of lives which fit the patient's criteria. At least over half of these lives are going to be what we term 'minimally happy lives', which is to say, they're lives in which—roughly speaking—the patient feels more overall happiness than unhappiness. Now, take a guess. Which of these is the maximally happy life?"

Eva thought about it, cautiously. "Is it even in this set?" she asked, carefully. "And is there only one uniquely maximally happy life?"

"Good," Robert nodded. "You're seeing the problem. If you're lucky, there's more than one maximally happy life. That is, more than one life ties for maximally happy. The bigger problem is: what happens if that life doesn't lie within the set delineated by the patient's criteria?"

Eva frowned. A tricky question, but not much trickier than the ethics case studies thrown at them during the Professionalism module back at the Institute. "I suppose we pick the local maxima, within the set established by the patient's criteria. It's not our job to determine what should make them most happy."

"Exactly," Rob said. "It's the most important rule of life-generation, Eva, so you need to be very clear about this. We are not here to 'play God with the patient's mind'," he crooked his fingers in scare quotes, "Or whatever the latest slogan protesters like to come up with is. We're here to _help_ the patient die well, having lived a fulfilling life—our place is not to judge them for their criteria, nor to tell them their criteria is wrong. Our task is an important one: we are their partners on what might be the greatest journey they are ever going to undertake. _We_ help them die without regrets, feeling as if they've accomplished something. And they have." He folded his arms across his chest, regarding her sternly. "None of this involves us deciding on their behalf that they would be happier given a completely different life trajectory. Given the sheer number of alternative branches, it's trivially true that one other branch is going to satisfy them at least as much, if not more so, than the life you end up generating for them. Your job isn't to second-guess and determine what the maximally happy life will be. We do this for _them_ , Eva. For the patients."

"Yoo-hoo! Ground control to Eva!" Neil carols. "C'mon, it's been a long while since you zoned out on me like that."

Eva blinks free of the memories. "Sorry," she croaks. "I was…thinking."

"My dear girl," Neil replies, dryly, "I think I gathered as much. So, spill it: what was so much more interesting than making fun of my adolescent self's shitty taste in hot girls?"

She doesn't know if she can explain this, or if she really wants to; this darker, heavier direction her thoughts have taken on what is supposed to be a sunlit afternoon, talking to Neil right after he made it back from the conference.

"Just work things," Eva replies, at last.

Neil rolls his eyes. "Seriously? All work and no play is bad for you, Eva. You should do something _fun_ —like a _One Piece_ marathon. Doctor's orders."

"We're not even that kind of doctor, you know."

"Uh-huh. Shiny doctoral degree says otherwise," Neil shoots back. "Plus, you listen to Dr. Dre, don't you?"

"No, who's he?"

"Well, he's not a real doctor, makes awesome music, and gets mad respect. So there."

Sometimes, Eva isn't sure Neil-logic—in all its pretzel-knotted glory—works the same way as regular logic. She also isn't sure it's worth making the effort to follow it, at times.

"'So there?' How old are you, five?"

"You've found my secret—I'm a five year old living in the body of a doctor, and so I'm gonna live forever! Muahahaha!"

"Keep working on that evil laugh, you might get there one day."

"MUA-HA-HA-HA—HOUCH! Goddamnit, Eva, you don't elbow someone in the middle of a truly magnificent evil, gloating laugh!"

"So find something better to do," Eva replies, implacable. "Before someone from your department or from mine wanders in here to yell at us for slacking off. And anyway, these reports aren't going to write themselves."

* * *

She and Neil; they fight their battles the same way, but it takes Eva a long time to realise that. She moves from assigned patient to assigned patient, never feeling quite settled, yet never quite feeling…unhappy. Contentment, she decides. Is that the word she's been looking for? Or maybe: equilibrium.

They've been living for a long time in the halocline between the Institute and their student days and their work for Sigmund, and now finally she feels the shallow fresh waters of youth recede, to be replaced by the cold saltwater depths of adulthood.

Is this what she wants to be doing with her life?

Eva doesn't know. Her younger self had always dreamed of being a marine biologist, but passions fade and change and become muted given the relentless passage of time and contact with the unyielding realities of the world. Sigmund's scholarship meant she didn't have to pay for schooling at the Institute, whereas marine biology meant grad school, which meant finding a way to get funding, and even then, crushing debt and decades of uncertainty.

She's not _un_ happy, she just…

It's a struggle she voices to no-one; not to Yvette, not to Francis, who, if anything, has become quietly content with his transfer to Maintenance, nor to Neil, whose exuberance has become muted as well, though it's only something Eva notes in retrospect, as caught up as she is in work and her own thoughts about the trajectory her life has taken.

Even though Robert has made it clear his door is always open to her, she doesn't approach him about it either. She doesn't feel right, bothering her former mentor about it, and if Eva is to be perfectly honest with herself, she doesn't think he'll quite understand her doubts either. If Robert has one quality that Eva admires, it's that he never doubts; as far as he's concerned, he's exactly where he wants to be, doing exactly what he wants to be doing. He believes in this work: for him, it's a calling, and Eva only wishes she had that kind of pellucid certainty.

She scribbles a lot in her diary, and then keeps it under lock and key, because she wouldn't put it past Neil to barge into her office and read it.

She starts a vegetable garden again, one weekend, as a way of indulging in some purely physical activity. Nothing to do with that mindfulness stuff, not really, but her thoughts and worries have a strange way of trickling out of her mind as she tends to her vegetables, and there's a strange sort of satisfaction at getting to eat the products of her own labours, so she keeps it up.

Some days, she and Neil walk home together, late at night, after they're done with work and dinner. She watches the distant lights—floating, on the river water—and the few pale shimmers of stars overhead, mingled with the electric glow of streetlights, and wonders about being alone in the world, about how it's possible to be around people, talking and laughing with them, and yet feeling completely and utterly alone, completely and utterly lost in a void, apart.

"Hey," Neil says, and she realises he's fallen silent, is gazing expectantly at her. "You all right?"

"Yeah," Eva answers, and it's only half a lie. "I think I am."

* * *

 _A/N: Whoosh. This is the first bit of a huge, spiralling-beyond 50k monster I am calling the 'Neilariad' (probably the last TTM fic I'm ever gonna write in a long while, because holy heck is this kind of epic exhausting) because I don't really know what the heck is going on anymore, so help me writing gods. I may still come back and revise this first bit as I'm not sure I've got it down quite right, and I'm still adjusting as I write._

 _Scope of this fic can be described as 'Neil and Eva's 'memory traversal school' days, early SigCorp, all the way to whatever the heck's going on with Neil past Finding Paradise' along with huge lashings of sci-fi and friendship and mindcucumbery. Expect the mindcucumbers, this fic has so many mindcucumbers that I've been mindcucumbered even trying to make sense of the plot. (Hint: you may have noticed this is not quite linear.)_

 _Additionally: for the curious, the argument about the 'hard limits of simulation' mirrors an existing debate about: A. what the substrate of consciousness is (if there is in fact one), and B. a thought experiment about a special kind of entity called philosophical zombies, which appear and behave exactly like you and me, but lack any kind of internal experience whatsoever._

 _One final note to the reader: I have not labelled this as 'romance' or with any pairings. This does not mean that shipping things don't happen; it's simply that: A. I don't think, within the context of the story I'm telling, the tag 'romance' is appropriate as it may lead to certain expectations that aren't quite right, and B. people in previous fandoms have complained that when I write ships, it really falls into the grey area between 'friendship' and 'romance.' Once again, I pick the label that best fits with the story, without leading to unnecessary reader expectations._

 _-Ammaren._


	2. Act I, ii: the turning world

**Story of Your Life**

Summary: The problem isn't that Neil is dying. The problem is that Neil doesn't dare to hope, and Eva refuses to let go. The problem is that Neil and Eva are both equally bad at honesty and asking for help. The problem is that Neil knows how the story ends. In the end, the middle is all that's left.

* * *

 **ii. the turning world**

"Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?" – _Sputnik Sweetheart_ , Haruki Murakami

* * *

When the weddings come, they come all at once, in a massive flood.

All of a sudden, it seems as if everyone Eva knows is getting married. There are a few college friends, and then Traci phones over one morning to let Eva know Aaron finally popped the question, and the wedding's going to be held in six months' time. Eva puts in a request to HR for leave, and it's granted: in fact, she's startled to realise she's actually got days and days of leave to burn.

Yvette, too, is getting married, and Eva is the first to know. It's a casual conversation as they're driving back to the branch office in the car. "I just thought you ought to be the first to know," Yvette says, almost-hesitantly. "I'm getting married."

"Congratulations!" Eva exclaims, immediately. "I'm happy for you—when's the wedding?"

"We haven't planned that yet," Yvette admits. "There's a lot of logistics to be settled. Zach works for a different branch," and Eva winces in immediate sympathy. If their misadventures in trying to schedule the annual Christmas party so everyone can attend is any indication, juggling their respective schedules for the wedding will be a similar nightmare. At least, however, it isn't winter. "But that's actually the other reason why I wanted to talk to you. I'm applying for a transfer to work at Zach's branch."

And immediately, Eva understands. "Of course," she says, warmly. "I hope you get that transfer!"

"Me too," Yvette quips, and they both laugh.

The news soon spreads throughout the office grapevine: Yvette's getting married, and Yvette's transferring out, which means yet another goodbye party, and even more logistical nightmares—which, to be fair, will not be Eva's headache, and so she puts that out of mind.

Instead, she's concerned by other things: what to get both Traci and Yvette, and the occasional thought as to who she'll be next paired up with. In the middle of everything, Eva's pleasantly surprised to find herself promoted to _senior_ memory traversal agent, and all of a sudden, her office is swarming with people dropping by to congratulate her, and the goodbye party becomes a 'goodbye Yvette, congratulations Eva!' party.

She pops back from a visit to the pantry to find Neil sitting nonchalantly on her desk, eating steaming instant noodles out of a disposable cup with a plastic fork. "You know that's bad for you," Eva informs him, hands on her hips.

"Meh, live a little," Neil says. "Besides, I live for the convenience." He flashes her a brilliant grin. "So, how's it feel, Senior Memory Traversal Agent Rosalene?"

Eva thinks about it. "Good, I guess," she says, slowly; carefully, even. After all, despite having joined Sigmund Corporation at the same time, Neil's still a Technician Specialist, and sometimes…Eva wonders if there's just a little bitterness about it.

But no; Neil inhabits that very nebulous space between her professional life and her personal life, and while Eva's never very sure where exactly he falls given her preferred boundaries, she would like to think that their friendship is something she has come to—take for granted isn't quite the right word for it; it is comfortable, present; unremarked on, yet as essential as breath.

"Good," she says again, more firmly this time.

Neil's smirk broadens a little. "Good," he repeats. "'Course, you know what this means, right? More paperwork, more responsibilities…"

She sticks out her tongue at him, and he just chuckles.

"Oh-ho, so there _is_ a child hiding underneath that lab coat after all!" he clucks his tongue, mockingly. "I was beginning to think she'd shrivelled up and died from soul-crushing, paperwork-induced despair."

"It seems the reports of her death are greatly exaggerated," she retorts.

"So it seems," Neil says, ironically. "And you owe me a meal. A drink, at the very least."

Eva raises her eyebrows. "Oh? Do I?"

"Yeah, isn't that obvious?" he twirls the fork about, trying to capture escaping strands of soggy noodles and egg. "We're celebrating your promotion."

"And exactly how does that translate into owing you a meal?"

"'Cause I'm an awesome friend," Neil says, deadpan. "Also because I make one hell of a tiramisu—it's my grandfather's secret recipe—and if I like you enough, you might score some off me."

"I'm pretty sure that's what you told Rachel back in high school, only at least ten times more awkward."

"Ah, but you'll notice…" he sets down the emptied cup and smiles crookedly. "She _never_ said the cake was a lie." He crushes the plastic cup in his hand, and tosses it carelessly—his foot nudging her wastepaper basket just _so_ , such that Eva opens her mouth to snap at him and closes it again wordlessly when the crumpled cup falls right into her bin.

He winks, and then saunters out of her office, whistling the main theme from _Portal_ while he's at it.

"Show-off!" Eva calls out, after him, and closes the door.

* * *

Seniority brings with it a bigger paycheck, and more challenges and responsibilities. Eva now finds herself given charge of a student from the Institute on _her_ practicum, and finds herself wondering if she was exactly that wide-eyed and innocent when she interned under Robert.

Still, Clara is a decent intern: her lack of experience shows, of course, but it feels awfully strange to be explaining the fundamentals of her job to someone completely new. Intellectually, Eva _knows_ she's come a long way from when she did her practicum with Robert, but sometimes, it's awfully hard for that knowledge to actually sink in.

Maintenance, according to Neil, is being swarmed with interns and students on their practicum as well.

"It's awful," Neil reports, polishing his glasses on his lab coat, and not for the first time, Eva is struck by how rare it is to see those arctic-grey eyes without the intervention of his spectacles. "They're everywhere _and_ underfoot. I wouldn't trust most of them with anything so much as a screwdriver. One of 'em even nearly broke a piece of expensive equipment with a soldering iron." He blows lightly at the glasses, squinting at the lenses, before placing them back on, satisfied. "God, I'm so glad I didn't intern here. I'd never trust myself with anything more than a screwdriver, if I had."

"You realise this is not the first time we've had interns here at SigCorp?" Eva asks, dryly.

"Eh," Neil waves that off. "Sure, but they weren't _my_ problem until this year."

"Why are they your problem, anyway?" If Fieldwork is any indication, both students on practicum and interns are assigned based on seniority. Sure; she and Neil have both been around for a while now, but from what Eva hears, the turnover rate in Maintenance is a lot lower than in Fieldwork, and so even now, Neil and Francis are near the very bottom of the… _oh_.

It all makes sense, now.

Neil scowls. "'Cause _someone_ —and when I say 'someone', I mean Francis—got a promotion, and is now managing a bunch of tech monkeys, which means I get thrown to the baby wolves." For all they've joined SigCorp at the same time, Neil's somehow managed to remain exactly where he started: at the very bottom of the ladder, and Eva wonders—not for the first time—exactly _why_.

"They're probably not that bad," Eva begins, soothingly, before she realises that's an extremely bad idea.

"Not that bad?" Neil demands, gesturing so fiercely and wildly that Eva's surprised he hasn't accidentally hit her. "To hell with that! Three of 'em—and I'm not counting our moron with the soldering iron, here—shouldn't even be allowed in a lab! Another one didn't know the difference between current and voltage—how the hell do you get a practicum as a technician and not know the difference? And that's without adding those who know completely irrelevant and esoteric programming languages…except the ones that matter here!"

"Okay," Eva has to admit. "That sounds pretty bad."

"Yeah," Neil says, darkly. "You lucked out with Clarisse, here."

"Her name is Clara," Eva corrects him.

"Yeah, yeah, whatever."

"…Do you even know your interns' names?"

"What, apart from Incompetent One, Accident Two, Hopeless Three, Useless Four?" Neil's scowl deepens when Eva gives him a reproachful look. "Don't look at me like that, they'll earn their names when they stop being so darned useless."

" _Neil_."

"I know one of them's called Jim," Neil mutters, mutinously.

"Look at it this way," Eva offers. "You'll probably be promoted soon, and then you won't have to deal with the interns next year."

Neil groans. "Okay, first, that's not comforting since that means I'm still saddled with them until their practicums are over, and who knows if I'll still be given charge of them next year? Second, I really don't care about getting promoted." He looks at her. "I wanted to make a difference. Still do. God, Eva, do you know how old our technology is?"

"No," Eva admits, but adds, wryly, "But I'm guessing you'll tell me."

He flashes her a brilliant smirk. "Guessed right. Twenty years, Eva. It's been twenty years since they developed the first machines for memory reconstruction, and about fifteen years since it left the lab and was okayed for public deployment. Ever since then, we've built in piecemeal improvements—mostly safety-oriented ones—but we've barely scratched the surface of what this technology can do. So get this: our machines do things safer, but they pretty much do nothing at _all_ different since the first prototype."

Eva frowns, trying to make sense of this. "Is this usual?"

"Bah, usual, schmusual, that doesn't matter," Neil says, waving it off dismissively. And there it is again, that flicker of diamond-hard intensity she glimpsed that day in the café, when he asked her to help him cheat his way through the entrance exams. "We're stagnating, Eva. There're hints of what can be done in journals, but not the top journals, 'cause no one wants to publish this kind of data, 'specially since running trials is hard and generally requires human experimentation, which of course, is pretty much career-ending. Companies don't wanna push the envelope so much anymore: it's all about safety refinements. 'Course, if you go military, intel, or law-enforcement, _maybe_ some think-tanks and research foundations, you'll still find hush-hush projects trying to break boundaries, to do stuff like rewrite memories without damaging people in the process, or to steal stuff from people's minds, but even that…a lot of it's just so narrow-minded, y'know? And dirty."

It was the most Eva'd heard from him on the subject, and she tells him as much.

He smiles, tiredly. "That's 'cause I'm kinda sick of this, you know," he admits. "I get the feeling that they're gonna come down harder than ever, that these soft technological limits are gonna be hard ones, because you can't get published, and you can't experiment with the technology. We even used to have a small R&D division in Maintenance, and now everyone's getting quietly transferred away to other areas." He leans forward, and she can all but sense the frustration humming through vein and muscle. "But there's so much more we could _do_ than just rewriting memories, or digging stuff out of people's minds, Eva!"

"Like what?"

For a moment, she thinks he'll tell her. An emotion she can't quite read flashes—briefly—across his face, and then is lost, and then Neil swallows.

"Like…stuff," he says, at last.

"Uh-huh."

But Neil ventures nothing further, and Eva, in turn, doesn't ask.

In some ways, Neil is absurdly private and secretive—she sometimes suspects that he keeps secrets for the sake of keeping secrets, and getting to be all annoyingly mysterious. Eva's learned by now that it's better not to pry, if only because the _best_ way to get Neil to clam up on something is to let him know you _want_ to know.

So Eva doesn't ask. And the truth is, it's a monentary curiosity, nothing more, and she forgets about the matter soon after.

* * *

If life were a narrative, or a stage-play, Eva would've considered their earlier conversation to be foreshadowing. But because it isn't so simple: one doesn't simply draw connections between past and future until—always—in retrospect, and sometimes, not even then, she doesn't think any further on Neil's growing restlessness.

In truth, what would she have made of it, in any case? She had her own life; her own new challenges and responsibilities, and she was startled to realise one day that it had easily been weeks since she'd last thought about whether she should leave SigCorp, or asked herself if she was happy where she was.

Maybe she wasn't happy, not quite, but the word 'content' seemed like a good one; she felt safe and confident, satisfied with what she was doing, and all in all, Eva wrote in her diary that she felt it was a good change.

Thus, surprisingly or otherwise, Eva _isn't_ the first to find out when Neil starts to act out.

In hindsight, she will admit that all the signs were pointing to it; he drops her random text messages during office hours, occasionally steals her stapler, and on one memorable day—blasts the Imperial March from his desktop for an hour straight before Robert marches all the way down to Maintenance, sticks his head in and yells at Neil to shut the damned thing down.

Francis finally buys Eva lunch and sits her down for a long chat about Neil's behaviour over bamboo baskets of savoury soup-stuffed dumplings at a pretty upscale Cantonese restaurant a few blocks away from the office.

"Honestly, he's kind of an ass," Francis says, poking at a dumpling with his chopsticks. He makes a face when he realises that doing so only causes soup to spill out. "Oh shit!"

"You want to grab them by the knot," Eva explains, and demonstrates.

Francis grimaces. "Thanks, I'll keep that in mind." He isn't very good with the chopsticks, and in the end, Eva ends up helping him roll the soup-stuffed dumplings onto his spoon. The noodles, at least, simmered as they are in spicy broth, are to die for. "I still don't really know how you deal with him when he gets…"

"Annoying?"

Francis smiles, faintly. "I think he'd say he's always annoying."

"A regular gadfly," Eva supplies.

"Yeah. Anyway, I know Neil's a friend and all, and it was fine when we were both techs, but…" he trails off.

"We go back a long way," Eva shrugs, because in truth, she sometimes has no idea as well. "I guess we just kind of grew on each other."

Francis sighs as one particular dumpling gets especially mutilated, and soup sloshes all over his plate. "He likes to mouth off. I get that. Fine. I can deal with that. He's pretty funny, even, and, well, we've known each other for a while now. But he keeps getting distracted on the job by all sorts of irrelevant things and he screws around with his paperwork. He terrifies half the intern batch to tears, and I've students quietly asking if they can be supervised by me instead. And I've got HR _and_ the boss breathing down my neck about _him_."

"Why you?" Eva asks, which is the first thing that comes to mind, and then she realises how that sounds. "I mean, do they expect you to be in charge of him or something?"

"No, but apparently, the reprimands just roll off him like water off a duck's back." Francis breathes and finally lifts his head, offering her a shaky smile. "Something something I'm his friend and batchmate and we share an office, ergo I automagically know how to deal with him." Eva privately wonders if Francis isn't making the exact same assumption here. "Honestly, I'm just talking to you because I'm at my wit's end. I've tried talking to him, but it's like dealing with a wall, and as much as he's an ass, I'd really rather not get him fired."

Eva blinks. "It's that bad?"

Francis nods emphatically. "Well, yes. What do you expect? It's been a bad series of months for Maintenance—well, really, just SigCorp—as a whole; everyone's working under a lot of stress right now." He counts off on his fingers. "Copyrighting memory-audio, for one. And lately, Project Hemlock lobbied hard and got their new set of regulations pushed through."

"Project Hemlock?" Eva asks. That's new to her. She's definitely aware that life-generation is still a controversial service—their branch of SigCorp has begun to acquire its share of protesters—but the name doesn't ring a bell.

"Oh, right," Francis says, smacking his forehead lightly. "We don't see them so much down at this branch, but they sent me over to the other branches for a while and they were _everywhere_." He shakes his head. "They're a grassroots group—activists, college students, the works." Neil would've made a sardonic comment there, Eva finds herself thinking. "They spent a lot of time picketing the other branches. Funny thing is, they want almost the same thing we do. A good death for the dying. The only thing is that they think what we do doesn't make for a good death. The usual stuff about believing a lie, dying inauthentically, and all that."

Eva's all too familiar with these concerns. The cases in which a patient asks them to _wipe_ their memories are the worst. SigCorp doesn't like to brand itself as a memory alteration service, of course, and so the patients are commonly asked to focus on what alternate life they'd like to lead instead. But the line between memory alteration and life-generation is hair-thin, and often, patients simply waive specificity in favour of requests that ask for certain memories to be expunged.

Sometimes, it's enough to drive you into the deep end of cynicism. Especially when life-generation just makes those patients make a different set of mistakes altogether.

"Anyway," Francis is saying, and Eva wrenches her attention back to their lunch conversation, "The new set of regulations mostly just makes life harder for everyone: restrictions on how session logs are to be kept and how, when they need to be expunged, the requirement for the patient's lawyer to view the logs alongside Compliance, a narrower time-window before the patient's medical provider is permitted to call in…" he shrugs. "Taima thinks it's mostly because they're riding the wave of public opinion from the Odell trial. We'll see if it sticks."

Eva takes a sip of iced tea, enjoying the subtle fragrance of jasmine mingling with lemongrass. "I heard Odell's appealing." They've all been following the Odell trial, of course; nevermind that Fergus Odell works for Hermann Corporation instead of Sigmund. Neil hadn't pulled any verbal punches when he texted her, _This is several levels of fucked-up_.

Eva had replied, _Language_ , and then, _I know_.

The situation with Fergus hadn't been discovered until Compliance had gone through the session logs of his most recent patient and discovered that Fergus had in fact directly contravened the patient's dying wishes and instead, fulfilled the wish expressed by the most recent algorithm traced from the patient.

"Don't know," Francis replies. "I probably would too, in his shoes." He dips a slice of ginger into vinegar, and rolls it about, idly. "Honestly, it sounds like a pretty shit situation all around: he gives the patient her wish, and it would've made her miserable. That contract hadn't been updated in _years_. Except now, the media's all over it since he 'played God with her life and mind', and who knows what other indiscretions the rest of us might be performing."

"There's really only one solution, as far as I can see," Eva replies, because she'd thought about it while following the Odell trial, realising that something very much like that could one day become _her_ problem. "Stay professional. Stay objective. Give them exactly what they asked for. And if you can't fulfill their expressed wish, as per the contract, then just pull out. There's no shame in that, even if you don't get paid. Better than making a hash out of it. We're not here to judge them, after all."

"Don't I know it," Francis remarks, wryly. "Back when I was still in Fieldwork, I had that one really weird patient who wanted to become a stripper at a nightclub, bless his peculiar mind…"

Eva goggles. "Seriously?"

Francis nods. "The things people wish for, huh? Anyway, Odell really should've settled. Now everyone's piling on the lawsuits, and he's probably finished in this business. I look at all of that, and I tell myself, every day, 'Francis, thank God you're in Maintenance, and none of this shit is your problem anymore.'" He stacks the ginger slice on a dumpling and finishes it off. "But anyway. About Neil…"

"I can try talking to him," Eva offers. "But Neil's Neil." Prickly, stubborn, and with an ego the size of a gas giant. "I'll do what I can."

"Hey, that's all I can ask for," Francis replies. "I'd really appreciate it; it'd take a great deal of this load off my back, as it were."

There is a brief silence, and Eva asks, "Well, what about you?" Mostly to make small talk, and especially to steer the conversation to anything, anyone, except Neil. "How's Maintenance treating you?"

Francis brightens up at the change of subject. "I like it there!" he enthuses, and then blushes slightly. "Not that Fieldwork was a living hell or anything, it was just…draining, you know? All the patients…it just got to me after a while. I don't know how you can deal with them day in and day out."

"I know what you mean," Eva replies, quietly. For isn't this what she wrestles with? It can be difficult, watching people make mistakes. Both Yvette and her college instructors speak of treating a patient with respect. Sneha once called it a sort of loving-kindness; a compassionate way of giving each patient the fullness of one's attention, for the brief moments they inhabit the patient's reconstructed memories. (Behind her, Neil was pretending to puke repeatedly.) "Sometimes, I'm not really sure how I deal with it, either."

It's a devastatingly honest admission that escapes her, and she half-wonders if she _should_ have made the slip at all.

But for some reason, Francis looks quietly _relieved_ instead. "Thanks," he says, at last. "I always thought it was just me. You never seemed to have any problems, and Neil's…"

"Neil," Eva supplies, and this time, they both laugh at how inadequate that description is, and yet how entirely appropriate.

They spend the rest of their lunch hour talking about all sorts of mundane things, with a healthy touch of office gossip and laughter. At the back of Eva's mind though, lurks a constant thread of worry.

* * *

Eva pushes down the door handle with her elbow and then kicks it open with her foot, doing her darnedest not to jostle the brimming mugs of coffee she's carrying.

She isn't particularly surprised to find Neil playing solitaire on his desktop. Francis is nowhere to be seen, which just makes this impending conversation a lot less awkward, thank goodness for small mercies.

"I smell coffee," he says, without turning around to regard her. "Give."

Eva scoots in and hands over a mug of coffee, keeping the other for herself. "You're in late," she says.

"So are you," Neil observes, swivelling his chair about to look at her. "What brings you into my humble slice of paradise?"

She looks about the office; notices a few shifted filing cabinets and an exceedingly huge and obnoxious multi-coloured framed poster screaming 'YOU ROCK.' A translucent divider separates Neil's half of the office from Francis's half, but as far as Eva can tell, the shift in décor isn't particularly obvious, though Francis's half of the office boasts more files and filing cabinets than Neil's. "I see you took down that _Legend of Zelda_ poster."

"Brought it home a couple of months ago," Neil replies. "I thought it was time for a change." He nudges aside the mug of coffee already on his desk and sips appreciatively at the hot coffee. "Ah, caffeine. Gotta love the smell of fresh coffee in the evening."

Eva hesitates, trying to find the right angle to approach the matter from. Wonders if there is, in fact, a right angle at all.

"What?" Neil asks, and she realised she's been staring blankly at him for a while now. "Is there something on my face? I mean, I know I'm a sexy beast, but this is still kinda creepy."

Eva does choke, splattering coffee over her white lab coat, and tonight's laundry is going to be a _bitch_. "Holy he—holy heck, Neil!" she all but yelps, and she can feel her ears burning. "That was a mental image I completely did not need, and for the record, those coffee stains are going to be a nightmare to get out."

"Eh, consider it a job hazard. No one takes you seriously if you don't look like you're busy keeping up the KPI," Neil says, flippantly, and offers her a shit-eating grin. "Well, if it isn't my devastating good looks, then what is it?"

"Francis talked to me," Eva says, at last, because there's just no _good_ way she can see to broach the topic, and almost at once, Neil's eyes turn to grey ice beneath his wire-rimmed spectacles.

He takes another slow sip from his coffee mug, and then sets it down on his desk and folds his arms across his chest. "Hoping you'll talk some sense into me?" His voice drops several degrees; Eva all but expects to see her breath misting out in the air.

"You really wanted this job," Eva reminds him, doggedly pressing on, because she promised Francis she'd do her best, and because she really doesn't want to see Neil fired just like that. "You wanted it so bad you asked me to cheat you through the entrance exams—"

"—Keep your voice down, will you?" he hisses, almost-reflexively, glancing about him.

"—and I still remember what you told me that day. Sigmund Corporation is the best, you said. You wanted to be right on the forefront of all those wonderful, new things we're doing with life-generation technology. Fine. You got in. You're right where you want to be, doing the things you want to do. Why jeopardise all that, right now?"

Neil just stares at her, and darn if it isn't near impossible to figure out what's going on in that thick head of his, what with those glacial eyes regarding her impassively. When he closes up like this, Eva's certain she'd get better results trying to breach bullet-proof glass with a butter knife.

Finally, he says, "We've had this conversation before."

"No, we haven't—oh." Eva says, as realisation sets in. "Oh."

"Yes," Neil says, snidely. " _Oh_."

She bites at her lip. "Well," Eva replies. "If you're having a mid-life crisis…"

"I am _not_ having a mid-life crisis, Eva!"

She stares at him. He stares right back at her.

"Right," Eva says, slowly. "Okay. You're not having a mid-life crisis, and I don't need to know why."

"Damn right you don't," Neil says.

"But it is _not_ a good time to go around pushing everyone's buttons," Eva continues, despite the small stab of hurt at his words. "Everyone's on edge because of all the new rules, and as much as you might not like him going behind your back, Francis's trying to save your sorry ass from getting fired. Even if you want to go elsewhere and do cutting-edge stuff there, you're still better off shooting job applications everywhere and switching jobs rather than getting booted from SigCorp."

She realises that her grip around her coffee mug has become white-knuckled, and forces herself to relax. "There. I said it. Do whatever you want with that information. Warning delivered." She gulps down the rest of her coffee, ignoring the flash of heat in her throat, and turns to leave. "Do me a favour and wash the mug before you return it."

"Will do," comes the laconic reply. Eva shows herself out, and packs her things and heads home. She looks back, once, to see a solitary light burning in a window—and she knows exactly whose it is.

She thinks—for a brief moment—of dropping him a text message but changes her mind; it's his problem, not hers, and she wants, more than anything else, dinner, a nice warm bath, and to curl up in bed with a good book. And to get the coffee stains out of her lab coat.

* * *

Neil calls in sick the next day. Eva shakes her head, but she's not all that surprised. In any case, it is a fairly uneventful and unproductive day: there's only one call that comes in, and the McMillans take that one.

She spends the time reading the new employee handbook they've issued in the aftermath of the regulations, and catching up on some forms she hasn't finished filling in since her last patient.

She does wonder what exactly Neil is up to, but eventually dismisses the thought. They're friends, certainly, but even friendship only stretches so far, and if he's trying to dig himself into a hole, it's not her job to go fish him out.

She is pleasantly surprised though, to find her mug—properly cleaned—sitting on her desk the following day. Inside: a bar of dark chocolate.

She heads over to Maintenance and pokes her head into Neil's shared office to find him typing away half-heartedly at what must be a backlog of reports and forms and all sorts of administrative minutiae, all labelled with a regular alphabet soup of letters and numerals, most of which Eva doesn't even recognise. There's even a jar of cookies on Francis's desk, and Eva's pretty sure it wasn't there before the last time she'd come by.

"Go or stay," he says, without looking away from his work. "Just close the door behind you. I don't need a bunch of gawkers come to see the rare spectacle of Dr. Neil Watts putting nose to grindstone."

Eva doesn't touch the door. "I'm getting some coffee," she informs him. "Up for a refill?"

"What, you're offering? You even need to ask?"

She scoops up the stained mug from his desk, and turns it about, and then realises exactly why it's so familiar. "Isn't this the one you got in high school?" The print isn't that difficult to read, although it's more or less obscured by multiple drip-stains from coffee and she wonders if Neil even bothers to clean his coffee mug. Probably not; she can just imagine him declaring he cleans it with more coffee.

Coffee coffee = new Coffee();  
if (coffee. Empty)

coffee. Refill();

else

coffee. Drink();  
}

Yes, she remembers this—Neil'd spent a great deal of time declaring that if people couldn't understand what the mug said (what's so undecipherable about it, Eva doesn't really know), then they shouldn't bother him.

Neil just rolls his eyes at her, though she hasn't said anything at all. "Yeah, yeah, I'm a sucker for a clever quote, blah blah blah."

She closes the door after her; after all, it wouldn't quite do for Neil to see her smiling like this. Message delivered and message received, and perhaps they're going to do just alright after all.

* * *

The long-planned party is postponed nearly five times due to various teams being called away at the last minute by an emergency. On the fifth time, they all just collectively give in and have the party, by which point Eva is months into her promotion, and Yvette is a week from leaving for good.

Even then, Lisa and Dylan wind up being called away at the last minute by a patient going critical halfway across town. "Don't wait up for us," Lisa tells them, grunting as she hefts the life-generation equipment, neatly disassembled and packed away in the nondescript, brushed-silver carrying case. "You know there's no predicting how long these things take."

"Don't be ridiculous," Robert says, shortly. "We can always hold it a little later."

"Hey, suit yourself, Bob," Neil shrugs, carelessly. "They're not the VIPs here, after all."

"It's Robert," Robert all but growls. His posture is stiff, while his arms are folded across his chest.

"Sure, Rob."

"Oh, dear God," Vera mutters, and moves between them. She isn't particularly tall: both Neil and Robert tower over her, but Vera's not the least intimidated. "Not again. _Someone_ take pity on me 'cause I've been putting up with the two of you since practically half a bloody year ago." That piques Eva's curiosity, but she doesn't interrupt. "No more, so help me God—go outside and compare the size of your dicks if you must, but do it _quietly_."

Eva decides that one day, she must buy Vera a coffee and discover her secret, because after a few moments of silent glaring, Robert steps away, his coat flapping about him disdainfully, while Neil opens his mouth—probably to make a coarse comment about the size of his dick, if Eva knows him at all, until she aims a light kick at his shin, and Francis swoops in and drags him away.

"Ow—ow! Eva! Francis! What are you doing?" The sound of their arguing voices fades as the door to the lounge slides shut, and Eva can't make out what's being said any longer. Still, Eva can't help shaking her head—some things, it seems, don't change, as much as Neil _has_ been making an effort.

"Half a year?" she asks Vera, who looks puzzled for a moment before the question clicks.

"Ah, right," Vera laughs. "The planning committee, of course. We mostly met when you and Yvette weren't around—we wanted to plan and make the party a surprise, but then…" she shrugs. "That call came in. Emergencies happen, as usual. I guess it won't really be a surprise anymore, but that can't be helped."

"Thank you, all the same."

Vera offers her an incandescent smile. "That's what colleagues are for!" she exclaims, brightly. "And they'll probably be back in a couple of hours, anyway."

Dylan stops by to offer Yvette a smile. "If we don't make it back in time, best wishes and congratulations once again, Yvette," and then he turns to Eva. "And congratulations, Eva! A well-deserved promotion indeed."

"We'll see you after we're done," Lisa says, nodding to Eva. "But just in case, best wishes to the two of you!"

Vera's guess turns out to be wildly optimistic. They initially try to defer the party, just in case Lisa and Dylan can make it, which means they mostly mill about the lounge, chatting. Sneha heads back to her office to get some work done and asks them to text her when the party's actually started. Hours pass, and still, Neil and Francis never return to the party, which Eva finds strange, until she picks up her mobile to find it's Neil who's calling.

"Go ahead with the party," he says, without any preamble.

"What?"

"You heard me," Neil replies, curtly. "There's big trouble with Lisa's patient."

Eva blinks. Surely she hasn't heard right. "Wait, but you're Maintenance."

"Yes, I am, and the fact that Francis and I are out there right now means they're in deep shit," Neil snaps. She thinks she can detect the edge of exhausted frustration to his voice. "I need to make a lot more phone calls and you're hogging this line."

"Oh, all right. I'll let the others know."

Good luck, Eva means to say, but Neil's already hung up. She stares down at the phone, the sound of the cut connection droning on until she switches off her mobile, stuffs it in her pocket, and heads over to let Robert and the others know that Lisa and Dylan won't be back in time.

The party is a little more subdued when it begins; Robert expressly asks her to keep the details from Yvette, but the fact they're going on without Lisa and Dylan tells the others that the pair have likely run into difficulties.

It's a pot-luck party in the lounge, and Sneha and Vera have managed a few decorations that _don't_ look recycled from the Christmas party, mostly colourful cardboard cutouts reading 'CONGRATULATIONS' and 'FAREWELL', as well as festive arrangements of balloons and streamers.

It turns out the entire office has chipped in to get them something, and Eva finds herself laughing as Vera describes just how difficult it is to get everyone to agree to get them something perfectly _normal_.

"Neil insisted you both needed a coffee mug with 'a quote that radiates awesomeness'," Vera chuckles, making the air-quotes with her fingers. "And Gavin said to get you a bunch of dinner vouchers and have done with, at which point Lisa suggested baking you a chocolate cake, and Taima countered by saying you could both use a shawl. It went on and on."

"Whose idea was this, then?" Eva asks, curiously, slipping the DIY terrarium kit back into a carrier bag. For all she enjoys gardening, she hasn't ever grown a terrarium before, and perhaps, she'll even be able to keep it at her office desk, or at her window...

"Sneha's!" Vera says, raising her voice, and across the room, the stately, graceful woman turns from her conversation with her partner, Gavin, and waves at Eva, grinning cheerily. "She noticed you had a number of plants in your office and made some discreet enquiries and thought this might be best."

Yvette, on the other hand, is beaming at a framed photograph of everyone in the office, and a gift certificate for a popular Italian restaurant chain. "How on earth did you get everyone in the frame for this shot?" she asks, bemused. "I don't even remember this."

"That's on Gavin," Vera says, and winks. "He's a wizard with Photoshop."

That just cracks them all up, and Eva is laughing, because now she can see where Neil and Francis have been photoshopped in, alongside Lisa.

"Lucky for me the photos were taken in the same room, and the lighting wasn't that different," Gavin says, in his slow, deep voice. "I think I was half afraid I'd just have to whip up some crazy effects just to cover it all up. Flames, lightsabers, smoke, spotlights…" he grinned. "You name it, I got it."

"Never let Neil hear you say that," Eva warns. "You'll never get another serious work photo out of him again."

"Perish the thought," Gavin feigns a shudder. "Seriously, though, you won't believe the kinds of requests I used to get…'Give me a six pack!', or 'Photoshop me surfing in front of the Eiffel Tower with a shark!' Guess which one's more workable?"

" _Can_ you actually do that?"

Eva starts, and almost drops the carrier bag and the DIY terrarium kit. "For heaven's sake, Neil!" she exclaims, crossly—he once made a habit of sneaking up on her back during his ninja phase, and she's more than _done_ with it—before realising he looks haggard and exhausted. Francis has joined them, and he doesn't look much better.

"How did it go?" Yvette asks, frowning. She definitely is aware that Maintenance doesn't usually need to head out to a patient, and that anomaly clearly worries her. In addition, Lisa and Dylan are still nowhere in sight.

Eva notices the quick glance that passes between Neil and Francis—a mutual reinforcement of walls; confirmation of a common front—right before the smile that's plastered on Neil's face ramps up in wattage. "Eh, you know," he says, with a shrug. "All in a day's work. Lisa'll be along shortly. Now what's this I hear about photoshopping people surfing in front of the Eiffel Tower with a shark? Can you actually do that?"

"You're doomed," Vera mouths to Gavin, the gesture exaggerated enough for everyone else to catch.

"'Cause y'know, if you can do something like that, why wouldn't you let your colleagues know, eh?" Neil says, loudly, looping an arm about Gavin's shoulder. "Also, just so we're clear, I demand a lightsaber the next time we get a photoshoot."

Gavin snorts. "Buy me a beer and then we'll talk."

"Done," Neil says, instantly. " _So_ done. We are getting a beer because I want a lightsaber and a cool screensaver. This is serious business."

As Neil more or less drags him off singlehandedly, Gavin does shoot most of them what must be a pleading stare a few steps short of 'SOS – Neil's kidnapping me, send help!' but as far as Eva's concerned, he's scoring a beer out of it, so it's not like he's being shortchanged in the process.

Neil's words, though, are more worrisome. He'd said _Lisa'd_ be along shortly. He'd said nothing at all about Dylan. Francis, she notices, is standing there, looking…lost. She goes over to him, and he brightens up at once, but she thinks she can see the cracks running through that smile.

"If it isn't the woman of the hour! Good to see you again, Eva!"

"Likewise. What're you…" she casts about for a better way to put things, but Francis just laughs.

"You mean what am I doing here, hanging out with Fieldwork?" he asks, with that easy, friendly smile he's always sported since their college years. "Neil told me about it, actually. Apparently someone from your department told him, because you both go back quite a long way. He asked me if I wanted to show up, since we're celebrating your promotion, and Yvette's transfer. Sure, I said. And here I am."

Eva lets out a deep breath, and steers him to just outside the lounge, where the sounds of the party and merriment fades away into silence as she shuts the door. "Neil says Maintenance doesn't go out in the field unless something's deeply fucked," she says, bluntly. Watches Francis start, at her unusual use of harsh language. "And Neil just said that _Lisa'd_ be joining us shortly. What happened?"

Francis sighs and runs a hand through his hair. He looks terribly, terribly tired and lost. "Eva, this is your party, I don't think you want to hear this right now…"

"Is he dead?" Eva asks, bluntly.

Francis presses his lips together in a tight line.

"Look, you and Neil may have each other's backs this time, but you aren't fooling anyone, and you're definitely not fooling me. If there isn't any cause to worry…" she trails off, and Francis finally cracks.

"He's dead," he agrees, grimly.

Eva doesn't realise she's taken a step back, doesn't realise her hand has gone to her mouth, doesn't realise that she's staring at Francis in utter shock. She and Dylan were never particularly close, but they'd exchanged friendly words, and it's a small office, and the idea that one of them has died, _died_ doing their job…

As if drawing those two words from him has shattered all his resistance, the rest of the story rushes out from Francis. It could've been anyone at all. The latest build created a critical vulnerability in the machine, fracturing the memories simulated and de-linking them, shutting off key segments of memory from traversal—it was _not_ Neil's fault, Francis adds, firmly, he's checked it himself and he didn't notice the problem with the build, and neither did Neil, and neither of them were working on that aspect of the build, and anyway, it's the work of an entire team of techs in Maintenance. "It was one of the interns, actually," Francis says, ruefully. "But of course, it's still our responsibility because we're supposed to triple-check this…"

Eva understands, of course. Clara has shadowed her on several traversals, and Eva has even allowed her to gather memory links and to prepare mementos, though always under supervision. It had been like that, too, back when she had been doing her practicum with Robert.

Lisa and Dylan weren't responding to attempts to contact them, so Francis and Neil rushed out after them, having quickly written a patch, with an older version of the machine in their boot.

"I've never driven like this before, I can tell you that," Francis says, shaking his head. "Anyway, our patch not only didn't work, it made the machine dump all data and shut down and go unresponsive. De-stabilised right away. Took it right down while Dylan was in there."

Eva is barely paying attention to the quiet, fervant curse slipping out of her mouth. Neither is Francis.

"What happened to Lisa? And the patient?"

"Lisa's fine, thank goodness. She got out; Dylan insisted on staying in there because they needed to not lose all progress they'd made in the patient's memories and they couldn't dissuade him. The backlash shock from the dump got him." Francis just looks at her, those frost-green eyes haunted. "It's the worst way to go, I swear to God. None of us could do a thing."

They'd all learned about it, back at the Institute. There were several things that could trigger a case of backlash shock, but it mostly affected the people carrying out a memory traversal, rather than the patient themselves. There was a reason for all the safety-mechanisms Neil had complained about: if anything, they made the procedure far safer for the patient than it was for those performing it.

Backlash shock, though. It had landed people in comas, unresponsive to the world around them, it had outright killed them, caused them to seize…

Eva can't help the shiver that crawls up her spine. She doesn't know if she'd dare to attempt another memory traversal, with backlash shock weighing so heavily on her mind. She wonders if it would be worse for Lisa, the next time she has to attempt a traversal. Wonders if Lisa will even _want_ to carry on, having watched Dylan die from backlash shock, right in front of her eyes.

"And the patient?" she asks again.

Francis's expression thaws slightly. "Fine. Well, I mean, she's dead, but…"

Eva blinks. "Wait, how'd that happen?"

"Neil," Francis says. "We brought an additional machine, remember?"

"He _didn't_."

"Lisa concurred and went with him," Francis tells her, matter-of-factly. "They pulled it off. I mostly monitored the situation and ran tech support, just in case they went and gave themselves backlash shock too." He grimaces. "Okay, sorry. Black humour, there. Heads are going to roll in Maintenance over this, but all in all, Neil's probably going to be fine."

Eva notices he hasn't said anything about himself.

* * *

Still haunted by the previous day's conversation with Francis, Eva finds herself knocking on Neil's office door the next day.

"Just a second!" Neil calls out, and a brief interval follows in which Eva swears she hears the sound of furniture being dragged and she taps her foot against the floor until _finally_ , "Come in!"

Eva pokes her head in, and notices that an entire filing cabinet has migrated into Neil's office. Francis's desk is, uncharacteristically, cluttered with paperwork, and Eva thinks she has an idea what it might concern. HR must be having a field day. "Doing some redecorating?" she asks.

"Mmhm," Neil says. "You like? I figure I missed my calling as an interior decorator!" He sweeps out his hands, grandly indicating his workspace, which, all things considered, isn't exactly _neat_ , but it's obsessively ordered. She doesn't know what the rules; the organising principles are, but it doesn't mean that they aren't there all the same. "Gotta make some space for that _sweet_ poster of Dr. Watts with his trusty lightsaber!"

"Don't quit your day job," Eva tells him, privately hoping Gavin at least got a good meal into the bargain, besides that promised beer. "Look, about yesterday…"

"Hm?"

Why does this conversation have to be so _hard?_ Neil just watches her, and heck if he doesn't have an excellent poker face. Maybe it's the spectacles, but part of Eva suspects that Neil would be just as difficult to read, even without them.

"Thanks for coming by the party. I appreciate it."

He raises an eyebrow, and for some reason, Eva has the impression that she's surprised him. "Thank Francis's driving. Professional racing lost a star when he chose to join Sigmund."

"The great Neil Watts, directing praise towards someone else?" Eva scoffs. "I don't believe it." What _had_ happened, out there? She knows what Francis had said, but a part of her wants to hear it from _Neil_ , wants Neil to tell her about what went down last night.

He shrugs. "Believe what you want."

The silence stretches out between them; uncomfortable and awkward, and Eva wonders, really, if she should have come. She all but blurts out, "It didn't go well, did it?"

Neil studies her with eyes like arctic ice. "It's too soon to say," he says, deliberately misunderstanding the question. "I haven't even begun putting in my printed collection of _Bleach_ covers yet, you know? Come back next week—you'll see, it'll be totally the best use of office space in this building."

"Neil."

He stops short, still watching her, the smile draining slowly from his features. "What?" he asks, at last.

"Don't," she says. "I know it's absolutely none of my business—"

"Damn right," Neil says, harshly, and Eva's minded of another conversation, in this same office, but she pushes on anyway, because she's here now, so she may as well just get it said and leave.

"—but you're not the only one here who failed someone, or a patient." She swallows, remembering, wondering at the same time how someone can be so very stubborn. So very blind. "We're all working in this together, you know. And if you need someone to talk to, well…I know a good café nearby, and I'll buy."

There. There was no point bashing her head further against a brick wall. She'd said her piece. Her hands balled into fists by her side. "That's it, really. I'll go now."

"It was a mess," Neil says, abruptly.

Eva doesn't know whether to stop, and settles for hesitating at the threshold, her hand still on the door-handle. She doesn't turn to look at him. Some moments are so fragile that even the slightest disturbance will shatter them.

Even something so slight, like a spoken word, like a hint of sympathy.

"Everyone screwed up. We tried. We _tried_ our damnedest. It didn't fucking work." He lets out a long, harsh breath. "If Francis hadn't been testing one of the machines running that build 'cause he's super-responsible and details-obsessed ever since he got that promotion of his…" She does turn now, almost-unwillingly. He looks at her, and she thinks she sees the same ghost in his ice-grey eyes. Then, _no_ , Eva realises. It's not that. It's that when Neil looks at her, he sees someone who could've been a ghost. Everyone's machines had the same upgrade. It could've been anyone called out that night. It could've been her and Yvette. It could've been her, dead of backlash shock, and now the rush of ice-water in her veins makes her shiver, and she can't seem to stop.

Neil throws something at her. Numbly, Eva catches it, and realises it's a spare lab coat, singed and smeared with grease, but she pulls it on anyway, shrugging into the too-long sleeves. "Sorry," Neil says. "It's the best I got. Anyway. I guess you heard some of it, then. Rumour sure works fast around here."

"Yeah. I heard about Dylan."

Neil nods. "Hell of a way to go." He shakes his head, seems to try for words, and fail. "You don't have to tell it to me. I really screwed up on this one."

"Francis said it wasn't your fault."

"Francis is a fucking saint, minus that anal obsession with detail," Neil snaps, and something in Eva clenches at the guilt and bitterness and hatred in his voice. "He'd say it's his fault and my fault, and everyone's fault, 'cept it's my fault alone because I'm supervising the useless baby wolves, remember? I was supposed to keep them from doing anything damaging at all, 'cept I guess I fucked up on that too."

He pulls his glasses free, wearily pinches the bridge of his nose with his free hand, in a gesture that seems surprisingly vulnerable. "Well. Francis spotted it, called me in—with some well-deserved yelling, mind. We both went over it again, and found the problem, and wrote up a quick patch. Then we went after Lisa and Dylan since they weren't picking up, and Lisa'd have had better luck performing amateur brain surgery with one of those ancient IBMs from the 1990s. But our brilliant new fix bricked the fucking machine, and Dylan _died_ because of it."

They'd rushed back though, and smiled, and smiled, and _smiled_ , because of the party, and because they didn't want to ruin it for everyone else.

"Neil," Eva says, again, and this time, the walls come slamming down hard.

"You should probably talk to St. Francis," Neil says, jamming his glasses back on, as if none of that just happened, as if he hadn't cracked, just a tiny bit, and shown her a flash of something so raw Eva is surprised he can just pretend everything's alright. "I mean, I imagine that's more or less what's going through his head right now." He laughs, but it's a little strained. "I mean, that guy basically turns guilt and self-flagellation into a religion."

As if he isn't doing the same, Eva thinks, but she just doesn't know what to say; how to get through to him. It feels like they're talking across two separate universes, and she's reminded of that night by the river, walking home with Neil, when it's possible to pretend that every pinpoint of light was a separate world, that each and every one of them, regardless of physical proximity, were so alone.

The loneliness wells up in her at that memory, thick in her throat, and catching every single thing she thinks of telling Neil. And really, how can her failures compare? Her patients would've died, in any case: were dying, by the time she and Yvette were called in. However blame was apportioned, Neil's failure had cost the life of a colleague.

"Offer still stands," Eva says, because she has to make herself say something, and she really does leave this time, and he doesn't stop her. There's only so many times she's about to get burned today, and while she considers herself Neil's friend, she's not his psychiatrist, and she's pretty sure he's made it clear he doesn't want to talk about it any further. Subject well and truly closed, moving on.

"I mean, if you're still buying, I'd never turn down a free coffee!" Neil calls out, after her, but Eva's well and truly done for the day and she finds herself walking mechanically back into her office and digging about for that bar of dark chocolate she keeps around for emergencies, and then peeling back the wrapper and foil and biting off a square.

It's not quite an emergency, but she could use the endorphins anyway, and it's one of the stragglers from the box Neil got her, so long ago.

She realises, later, that she still has his spare lab coat. She gets it cleaned and returns it to him, neatly-folded, with a pack of cookies on top.

* * *

Fallout from Dylan's death is swift and extensive.

HR immediately launches an internal investigation, and while Lisa has gone on administrative leave, she's still called back in for an interview. Neil and Francis and even a number of the affected interns and the other techs are called in for their own interviews, and the Maintenance department generally becomes a flurry of activity: on one hand, all existing equipment is recalled for emergency inspection, while teams are temporarily issued the same, older machines that Neil and Lisa hd used that night. On the other hand, while Eva hears very little from Neil and Francis, she guesses that everyone is just ducking and finding cover, waiting for the storm to pass, and hoping that they don't get placed in the firing line.

Neil and Gavin get roped into carrying down the equipment to Maintenance, with an excess of gasping and cursing.

Frankly, Eva never really knew that Gavin had such a wide vocabulary in certain respects.

"You could help, you know," Neil grumbles, as he catches her—and the others—looking on, mostly from the safety of the corridor.

"But why would I?" Eva replies, coolly. "You know what they say: suffering builds character."

Neil gives her an exceptionally disgruntled look. "I think I've had just about all the character-building I can stand right now, thanks."

"You _are_ quite a character," Vera says, dryly.

"Thanks for backing me up there, Vera," Neil retorts, struggling with the unwieldy equipment case. "I greatly appreciate it." He tries to turn about to look for Gavin and almost manages to run smack into the wall.

"Careful there, Neil," Gavin manages. "Wouldn't want to damage expensive equipment."

"Hey! What about me?" Neil complains. "I'm priceless."

"Not when there's a new batch of graduating students to pick from, you aren't," comes the remorseless reply.

Most of them attend Dylan's funeral as a group. Eva doesn't—didn't—know Dylan all that well, but like the others, feels compelled to show up all the same. As she's noticed by now, their branch of SigCorp is small enough that anytime something bad happens, all of them close ranks. So she goes along with the others, even though she has little to say about Dylan, though their few interactions have generally been positive ones.

They'd initially planned on carpooling, but Neil is horribly late. Eva isn't particularly surprised, but all the same. She calls him several times, but he never picks up, and finally she leaves a voice message telling him she's going ahead without him. In the end, he's the last to show up at the venue itself, still looping his tie about his neck.

"What took you so long?" Eva asks, keeping her voice to a hushed whisper.

A corner of Neil's mouth tilts in an almost-smile. "Oh, you know me," he murmurs, adjusting his dark tie. "I couldn't find a colour I really liked. Black _always_ makes me look half-dead on my feet, or like an emo kid."

It's true that he just looks wan and there are dark circles about his eyes, but Eva's fairly sure it has nothing to do with the colour of his attire.

"Uh-huh," replies Eva. The hang of his jacket _irks_ her, though; it's just slightly askew, and with a quiet huff, she reaches out and tugs at it.

"Eva, what—"

Eva draws back, and stares at him. "I think the word you're looking for here is 'Thank you, Eva,'" she informs him, coolly.

Another half-smile. "That's three words, you know."

"Still waiting."

Neil sighs. " _Thank you_ , Miss Eva," he says, his intonation almost exactly matching that of an exasperated preschooler. "Now that we've finished violating my right to look stylishly rebellious, can we go join the others?"

"Nuh-uh," Eva retorts, because if he's going to pull that one on her, he utterly deserves what follows. "You forgot the magic word, Neil."

"Really?"

"Not the word I'm looking for."

"Life before death, strength before weakness, journey before destination."

"…Nope, and that's nine words, since you were counting earlier."

"BAN-KAI!"

"You really want to be stuck out here for ages, huh?"

"I'm already late," Neil points out. "It's not like it'd make much of a difference at this point." Still, he relents enough to add, with a gimlet-eyed stare that goes right through his glasses, "Eva, can we _please_ go join the others now?"

"Since you asked _so nicely_ ," Eva tells him, making sure her tone drips over into the saccharine, "Sure. If you're good, we might even have ice cream later on. Wouldn't you like that?"

"If you're buying, sure," Neil says, unhesitatingly, as they walk on in to join the others. He just shrugs when she glances over at him. "What? You know my motto: never turn down free food."

* * *

A good number of them hit a bar after the funeral, exchanging anecdotes about Dylan over drinks. Eva joins them, mostly out of inertia, half-listening, half-wondering if she's supposed to be here.

She hasn't worked as extensively with Dylan as Lisa has; she hasn't mentored him, as Willis McMillan did, and all in all, she can't help but feel very alone and very out-of-place, even as the others converse and swap stories and drink to Dylan and speak—though never slightingly—of how difficult the situation must be for everyone, including Maintenance.

Francis and Neil sit right next to each other, as if trying to form some sort of common front, as if drawing some kind of solidarity from each other's presence, and Neil's expression becomes more and more mutinous as the other employees try to draw them into the conversation.

"Lisa mentioned you went in with her," says Gavin.

"Yeah, well, it wasn't the best idea I've had," Neil replies, shortly, and goes back to nursing his beer.

Gavin continues, undeterred, as if he's trying to draw Neil out. "She says you did great, though, especially since you haven't been through a traversal since the Institute."

"Huh," Neil stares down at his drink. "Lisa did all the work, honestly. I just trudged along as baggage, made sure things inside looked okay, that sort of thing."

His answers come in sparse monotones, and in the end, it's Willis who takes pity on everyone and changes the subject by addressing a question to Francis. "So, how's things down at Maintenance?"

Francis explains that everything is proceeding extremely slowly since this investigation is being conducted by a different branch of SigCorp, and just about everyone is on tenterhooks.

Neil just sips at his drink and looks as though he wants to burn holes in the table with his eyes. His reticence, his deflections; those have already told Eva that something's wrong. Neil likes to talk things up, to brag; he makes expansive gestures, but now his body language is all wrong, all inverted, all tight and closed-in, but she doesn't even know how to bring it up, or if it's any of her business, and that's definitely not the thing you mention in front of a whole group of colleagues anyway.

She notices as Neil eventually gets to his feet, murmurs excuses, and walks right out, leaving his beer half-untouched.

She's torn between the urge to follow him, and the urge to sit there and socialise with her colleagues, but she realises Neil's left his wallet behind on the seat and so that decides the issue for her: she scoops it up, briefly excuses herself, and follows him out into the night.

She finds him pressed up beside the brick wall of the alley, shaking, his shadow a dark smudge on the asphalt from the streetlight overhead and she hesitates, but steps forward, drawn now by concern.

"Neil?"

"Hell, Eva," he yelps, and she can all but see the moment in which he abruptly yanks the fractured pieces of himself back together again, and assumes a thin veneer of normality. It's as if he becomes someone else: cocky, assured, and too fond of running his mouth off. "You gave me a scare! Whatcha doin', following me out?" His tie is loosened, now, and his shirt-sleeves are rolled up and unbuttoned, and Eva feels a momentary flash of irritation at the disorder. He isn't wearing his jacket, though—hasn't been wearing it, since they left the funeral and headed for the bar. Now, he just hugs it to himself, numb, as if he's not quite sure what to do with it.

She proffers his wallet. "You left this behind," Eva says, keeping her tone as neutral as possible.

"Oh, shit," comes the eloquent response, as Neil pats at his pants pocket and realises it'd dropped out. "Thanks, Eva, you're a lifesaver."

"You're welcome," Eva sighs. "You…" She hesitates, but you can't be friends with someone for years—practically ages, now—and not have the sense of them.

"Hm?"

"You good?"

Neil laughs, though there's an edge to it, so sharp she's surprised they're both not bleeding out. And maybe they are, really. They just don't know it, yet. "Me? Tch, you know me, Eva—I'm the best. Always land right on my feet, too."

It's not what she's asking, and they both know it. She looks at him, and he looks right back at her, and even though she can see those hoarfrost eyes through his glasses, it strikes Eva, not for the first time, that for all people talk about eyes being windows, Neil has never been that way. She wonders if it's possible to know a person, and yet to not truly _know_ them.

"How's things with the inquiry?" she asks, eventually, instead.

Neil's expression remains shuttered. "Oh, you know," he says, blandly. "All sound and fury, signifying nothing. I don't think we're going to hear from them anytime soon. Francis already mentioned that, didn't he?" He pockets his wallet. "Guess we'll find out eventually."

She doesn't know what to say. She doesn't know if she can say everything will be alright, because they both know it isn't, and probably won't be, and there's another shattering loss of innocence out here, in the dark. Something has broken, deeply, and Eva does not know if it can ever be made quite right again.

And what's there to be said, really? She doesn't know what's wrong, even though she thinks she maybe has some idea, but he's made it clear he doesn't want to talk, and she's not sure it's her place to call bullshit and press him on it. How far does friendship run, anyway?

So she says nothing, and neither does Neil.

She doesn't leave, though, and he doesn't ask her to.

* * *

 _A/N: Several points. First, thanks to all who reviewed, commented, favved, or followed this story - it's always great to see that someone's enjoying the ride so far. Second, the gap between this update and the next will be (optimistically) one week; three at worst. Some plot elements are being introduced in the next section, and while not utterly critical, I want to make sure there is consistency and all loose ends are neatly tied up._

 _Third, some comments on this installment itself. The more I go through the dialogue of TTM, the more I have difficulty placing Neil and Eva's friendship. We obviously have Word of Gao that they're friends in and outside of the job, but a lot of Eva's and Neil's banter in TTM itself is pretty 'no prisoners.' I notice it's been toned down quite a bit for the Minisodes and especially for Finding Paradise. Making sense of their relationship is a bit of a frustrating exercise. I think the best way to see what happens in TTM and those moments when Neil pushes Eva away in the Minisode, or when Eva doesn't push, is to basically have ambiguous boundaries to their friendship: Neil bites if you get too close, and Eva isn't exactly the 'share everything' kind of friend to begin with. (I actually have a theory about what happened right before TTM, but nevermind that.)_

 _Then there's 'how dangerous memory-traversal is to the doctors.' We know that in FP, the Doctor tells Neil and Eva they have to get out before the whole thing destabilises and in TTM, Neil and Eva fight about who will remain in there. This is srs bsns, I think, but I'm having some difficulty figuring out the physiological mechanisms + what kinds of problems can happen to people attempting a traversal. Eva talks about "severe damage" which I find more convincing than Neil's thing about avoiding Alistair (we know Neil loves exaggeration and hyperbole, so it's not the best way to get a sense for the degree of danger.) There's a related problem which I'm not going to comment on right now._

 _Finally, some of you may have noticed that there has been no mention of cucumbers, tomatoes, or really, any kind of vegetables at all from Eva. While the mindcucumbers have not quite begun, some seeds have been sown here. Also, note that the coffee mug quote is actually missing a few brackets: unfortunately, FFN won't let me add them, so I've left it as it is._

 _-Ammaren_


End file.
